The aftermath of the development era

‘Third World’ through the prism of development

It has been a decade of global gloom – terrorism is on the rise, economies have reached pitfalls and there is a general air of unrest. The idealism that characterised past decades is long gone and it has become increasingly difficult to talk about revolution, ideological movements and development with the same confidence with which intellectuals and radicals once spoke on these crucial matters. It is as if the neat discourses of 1960’s – the high decade of both development and revolution– have been suspended on their rise to their summit, leaving only a trace of their glorious path behind. Instead, a new discourse about the ‘crisis of development’ has set in; one that is faced with questions about hegemony, identity politics, gender dynamics and radical pluralism.

In terms of recent history, development has been understood as capital and technological advancement and the respective policy and planning mechanism that facilitated the materialisation of such change. Although the failure of many traditional development schemes has provoked us to conceive alternative models and designs for social change, it is hard to separate the concept development from the Western imaginary. Even today, the future ‘developed’ society is based on a Western capitalist model of progress. As it has become clear, development is not simply an instrument of economic control over the Global South (Africa, Asia and Latin America), it is also an invention and strategy produced by the ‘First World’ about the inferiority of the ‘Third World’. On a global scale, development is one of the primary mechanisms through which the ‘Third World’ is imagined or has imagined itself, thus undermining and precluding other ways of seeing.

The very concept of the ‘Third World’ hinges on development discourses and practices that idealise Western modernity. As renowned analyst Arturo Escobar puts it, “Development can be best described as an apparatus that links forms of knowledge about the Third World with the deployment of forms of power and intervention, resulting in the mapping and production of ‘Third World’ societies.” Michel Foucault’s notion of power comes into play here as development constructs and governs the Third World discreetly, without people noticing it. Through this discourse, individuals, governments and communities are characterised as “underdeveloped” and treated as such. The vision of development, as we understand it, “goes back only as far as the post-war period, when the apparatuses of Western knowledge production and intervention such as the World Bank, the United Nations, and bilateral development agencies were globalised and established new economies of truth” (Escobar).

Development shares features with other colonising discourses and has emerged as a powerful tool for the production and management of the Third World in the post-1945 era. As the United States emerged as a superpower, the knowledge-production system was designed to suit North American sensibility. ‘Third World’ countries were controllable – new strategies and programmes were designed for their alleged benefit and they became objects of knowledge that in turn opened up new possibilities for power. The new programmes and policies that characterised development at large – the Green Revolution, macroeconomic policy, rural development – were all rooted in the same basic notion: progress is about paving the way for conditions that characterise rich societies such as industrialisation, mechanisation and urbanisation.

Development existed by creating hegemonic categories that portrayed “Third World” populations as ‘poor’, ‘malnourished’ ‘illiterate’ ‘oppressed’ and sought to rectify these conditions. For the Global North, these signifiers of oppression captivated the very essence of what the “Third World” was, downplaying cultural, class and ethnic differences and consolidating disparate societies into a single group. Seeking to eradicate problems, the “First World” interference multiplied them indefinitely as the same model of growth could not possibly be sustained across a range of countries.

After analysing the past, the post-development era requires the rejection of the entire paradigm of development based on the monopolisation of power and knowledge by a select few. The new movement for reformation should be rooted in local autonomy, with an interest in regional culture, politics and economics, and the defence of localised, pluralised grass roots movements for social change. Escobar wisely offers, “What is at stake is the transformation of political, economic and institutional regime of truth production that has defined the era of development.” Social movements would then seek to question and weaken stereotypical notions about “Third World” identities and displace understandings of modernity. While a critical understanding of development strategy is required, seeking an alternative to development also calls for an awareness of the actions of social movements. Social movements that are organic do not merely reflect or react to a crisis but have to be understood in the system of organisation that they themselves produce.

“If I knew for certain that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life… for fear that I should get some of his good done to me.”– Henry David Thoreau

The writer is a staff member of Pakistan Today and holds a degree from Mount Holyoke College.