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Development supplement...................................................................................................................................................... 1 ***NEG ................................................................................................................................................................................. 2 Govt to govt links.................................................................................................................................................................. 3 Aid Links ............................................................................................................................................................................... 4 Listening links ....................................................................................................................................................................... 5 Poverty links.......................................................................................................................................................................... 6 Poverty links.......................................................................................................................................................................... 7 Civil society aid links............................................................................................................................................................ 8 Civil society aid links............................................................................................................................................................ 9 Civil society aid links.......................................................................................................................................................... 10 Population Links ................................................................................................................................................................. 11 Environment Links.............................................................................................................................................................. 12 Technology Links................................................................................................................................................................ 13 Disaster Porn links .............................................................................................................................................................. 14 Crisis rhetoric links ............................................................................................................................................................. 15 Third World links ............................................................................................................................................................ 16 Participatory Development Bad.......................................................................................................................................... 17 Participatory Development Bad.......................................................................................................................................... 18 Participatory Development Bad.......................................................................................................................................... 19 Development extermination............................................................................................................................................. 20 Turns the case...................................................................................................................................................................... 21 Alternative: criticism........................................................................................................................................................... 22 Alternative: deconstruction................................................................................................................................................. 23 A2: Agency.......................................................................................................................................................................... 24 A2: Agency.......................................................................................................................................................................... 25 A2: Development Inevitable............................................................................................................................................... 26 A2: Masking ........................................................................................................................................................................ 27 A2: Perm.............................................................................................................................................................................. 28 A2: Re-appropriation .......................................................................................................................................................... 29 A2: Re-appropriation .......................................................................................................................................................... 30 ***AFF ANSWERS ........................................................................................................................................................... 31 Development 2AC............................................................................................................................................................... 32 Development 2AC............................................................................................................................................................... 33 Agency................................................................................................................................................................................. 34 Homogenization / agency ................................................................................................................................................... 35 Re-appropriation.................................................................................................................................................................. 36 Crack to development ......................................................................................................................................................... 37 Work within the system ...................................................................................................................................................... 38 Work within the system ...................................................................................................................................................... 39 Monolithic ........................................................................................................................................................................... 40 No Alternative ..................................................................................................................................................................... 41 No Alternative ..................................................................................................................................................................... 42 A2: Crisis rhetoric / demonization link .............................................................................................................................. 43 A2: Speaking for others ...................................................................................................................................................... 44 A2: Third World link....................................................................................................................................................... 45 A2: poverty link.............................................................................................................................................................. 46 A2: poverty link.............................................................................................................................................................. 47 A2: Escobar ......................................................................................................................................................................... 48 A2: Latouche ....................................................................................................................................................................... 49 A2: Rahnema....................................................................................................................................................................... 50 Development has good aspects........................................................................................................................................... 51
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Aid Links
Aid is Western management of the other Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty, 1989, p.22-3
But other difficulties persist which defy simple managerial solutions. At the root of these is the humanitarian ethic itself in which aid becomes something that the rich compassionately bestow upon the poor to save them from themselves. Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher best summed up this patronising attitude when she said of Ethiopian peasant farmers: `We have to try to teach them the basics of long-term husbandry. The truth is that there is very little we can teach these tenacious and courageous people about the basics of their trade that they do not already know far better than we do; they have been extracting a living-and often a surplus from the harsh eroded mountainsides of their homeland for millennia. What they do need, if they need anything, is the means to maintain their productivity in the face of escalating ecological disaster. Mrs Thatcher's thinking on the subject, however, is indicative of the manner in which aid becomes transformed by the strange alchemy of mercy from mere neutral material help into something that `we', the rich, do to `them', the poor. Between the rich and poor constituencies are `our' representatives in the field, the middle-men - the voluntary, governmental and multilateral organisations that mobilise and deliver the aid. These organisations are riddled through and through with notions of compassion that are, as one observer has put it, `inherently ethnocentric, paternalistic and non-professional'. Their stag' are outsiders in the unindustrialised countries in which they work. They hail from societies which believe themselves to be more highly evolved than others (that is, from developed as opposed to underdeveloped societies) and which are deeply convinced of the superiority of their own values and of the supremacy of their technical knowledge. Precisely because of such attitudes, a medical programme for Ugandan refugees in southern Sudan was run during 1984 by a European nurse while a fully qualified Ugandan doctor (himself a refugee) was given only minor responsibilities. A former principal of a Ugandan agricultural college was also among the refugees. He was unemployed, according to Oxford anthropologist Barbara Harrell-Bond who was then conducting research is the camps. However: The agencies drafted in a number of inexperienced and less qualified personnel from the US and Europe to run the agricultural programme for refugees. The
advertisement for one position of agricultural adviser illustrates the point. The advertisement asked for applicants who would be able to teach Ugandan farmers how to grow sorghum, sweet potatoes, and cassava, whereas the most serious problem the refugees faced was lack of hoes and seeds. In one African country I met an anthropologist from Manchester University who had been contracted by Britain's Overseas Development Administration to do a survey amongst settled farmers in a tropical area that was about to be extensively sprayed to eradicate tsetse fly (and in which limited spraying had already begun). What he discovered, after conducting detailed interviews, was that the local people were bitterly opposed to the project. Many of their chickens, which contributed an important part of their diet, had been killed by the initial spraying and they did not want to lose any more. In addition, they were apprehensive that once the tsetse flies were gone nomadic herdsmen would move livestock in and destroy their crops (cattle cannot graze in areas of tsetse infestation because of trypanosomiasis). The anthropologist's findings were ignored by ODA, which went ahead with the spraying anyway (indeed, it is difficult to see why the survey was commissioned in the first place; the decision to bombard the area with insecticide had been made sometime before and was, according to the anthropologist, irrevocable). This is, unfortunately, typical of the way in which `aid' decisions are made without reference to
those whom they will most immediately affect. Only a very few researchers from the industrialised countries (they are predominantly anthropologists or ecologists, who have no influence upon what happens) listen to the opinions of the supposed `beneficiaries' of the processes of development and have any degree of access to what one observer has called `the rich and detailed system of knowledge of the poor'. Aid workers, on the other hand, who are directly engaged in development, `are ignorant of and conditioned to despise that knowledge'. In general the bigger, the more prestigious and the more bureaucratised the agency the more inclined it will be to despise and thus ignore the wishes and opinions of its clients. Once again, the negative and often murderous consequences of the wide prevalence of this state of mind amongst expatriates who administer aid programmes become most tragically apparent in the delayed, inadequate and inapposite responses that they make to catastrophes. Their responses to other kinds of aid challenge - those concerned with long-term development rather than with short-term emergencies - are conditioned by the same attitudes of cultural and technical superiority and are thus equally wrong-headed, as other parts of this book will show. But disasters, by their very nature, tend to bring things out into the open with the result that the failures of the aid agencies in this particular setting are more conspicuous than elsewhere - and thus are more frequently exposed by the mass media.
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Listening links
Listening in the context of development reinforces Western domination Larry Lohmann, The Ecologist, Jan-Feb, 1993
Even the sharing and exchange between Southern and Northern cultures which is proposed by the most progressive development thinkers as a response to decades of imposed development models can do little more than reinforce a unitary system of Western domination. It is the dominant, after all, who are usually most eager to make themselves understood, celebrate diversity, or make the people visible; the oppressed often have good reason to remain silent in the presence of a superior power which could use their knowledge against them.
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Poverty links
Poverty is a loaded word. It implies material goods are all that is relevant Md Anisur Rahman, Peoples Self-Development: Perspectives on Participatory Action Research, economist who headed the ILOs Programme on Participatory Organizations for the Rural Poor, 1993, p. 136
One might even say that the very notion of 'poverty', conventionally conceived in consumeristic terms, distracts from the human need to be fulfilled by creative acts. The first man, or woman, or the first human community, was not 'poor' for not having any clothes to put on or shelter to house the body: it was the beginning of life, to move forward from there, by creating and constructing with one's own priorities, i.e. with self- determination. People become poor when their resources are appropriated by others, thereby denying them not only the basic material means of survival but more fundamentally, through dependence on others for survival, their self-determination. The communities whose efforts at authentic development are reported in this chapter may be 'poor' by the material standards of the so-called 'rich', but are immensely rich themselves in the culture and values they are showing in the way they are moving forward as part of a selfdetermined collective endeavour.
They deny agency by appropriating the word poverty to imply a lack. That masks liberatory visions of doing without Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Hague Institute of Social Studies, Third World Quarterly, v21, n2, 2000
Poverty is in the eye of the beholder. Sachs (1989) distinguishes between frugality, as in subsistence economies; destitution, which can arise when subsistence economies are weakened through the interference of growth strategies; and scarcity, which arises when the logic of growth and accumulation has taken over and commodity-based need becomes the overriding logic. In this early work, Sachs's policy recommendation is to implement growth strategies with caution and to build on frugal life styles. This matches the recommendations made all along by `ecological developers' such as the agronomist Rene Dumont (1965, 1974), to follow growth strategies in parallel with appropriate technology and maximum use of local resources. But the rejection of either growth or development does not follow. `Poverty' is not simply a deficit, for that would assume simply adopting the commodity-based perspective of the North; `poverty' can also be a resource. Attributing agency to the poor is a common principle in alternative approaches such as `conscientisation' a la Paulo Freire, human-scale development (Max-Neef, 1982, 1991; Chambers, 1983), participatory action research and the actor-orientated approach. According to Rahnema, while poverty is real enough, it is also a culturally and historically variable notion. `The way planners, development actomaniacs and politicians living off global poverty alleviation campaigns are presenting their case, gives the uninformed public a distorted impression of how the world's impoverished are living their deprivations. Not only are these people presented as incapable of doing anything intelligent by themselves, but also as preventing the modern do-gooders from helping them.' (1992: 169) This is a different issue: it concerns the representation of poverty. By way of counterpoint, Rahnema draws attention to `vernacular universes' that provide hope and strength; to the spiritual dimension (`Most contemporary grassroots movements have a strong spiritual dimension', p 171); and to `convivial poverty', `that is, voluntary or moral poverty' (p 171). This suggests affinity with the lineage of the Franciscans, liberation theology and Gandhian politics. In this view, it is the economics of development that is truly pauperising.
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Poverty links
Their focus on needs unmet treats the South as dependent, rather than people to cooperate with Md Anisur Rahman, Peoples Self-Development: Perspectives on Participatory Action Research, economist who headed the ILOs Programme on Participatory Organizations for the Rural Poor, 1993, p. 185-6
I suggest that a focus on economic needs and economic 'poverty', a culture of development discourse that becomes preoccupied with what the people do not have, gets trapped in the negative thinking and dependence orientation that this generates, rather than motivating the society to become constructively engaged in moving forward. With a constructive engagement, the people show imaginative ways of progressively fulfilling their needs and urges. This includes, naturally, their need and urge for economic betterment. However, in view of what has been said above, it is the constructive engagement, rather than economic achievement per se, which is the more universal aspect of popular initiatives - the fact that the people are mobilised, engaged in tasks set by themselves and going about them together, pooling resources and energy whereby they can do better than walking alone, drawing strength and sustaining power from a shared life and effort. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail (in their own terms); but through all this they move forward in the evolution of (search for) their lives. It is such a positive evolution that is possible, and this is important in its own right, both for the people involved and for the future generations to whom they can pass on the heritage of constructive social engagement to move through life with all its odds, showing their creativity and a spirit of tackling challenges, developing thereby as a human personality.
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Turn: scarcity - short term improvements are overwhelmed by economic modernizations enslavement and cultural destruction Majid Rahnema, guest prof at University of California Berkeley and former member of UNDP ,The Development Dictionary, 1993, p.168-9
Certainly, the economic approach to life may well lead for a time to a massive or more efficient production of goods and commodities, that is, a development of things. Yet both the resources and the needs it creates inevitably lead to a situation of permanent scarcity where not only the poor and the destitute, but even the rich, have always less than they desire. Moreoever, regardless of the level of wealth reached by a society, it is a fact that the poor are always the ones who suffer the most from the gap generated between their needs and the economically produced scarce resources. This is particularly so as the same economy increasingly imputes to them new needs of its own, ever more difficult to meet. Thus, it is becoming clearer to many that, however their needs may be defined, it is not only an illusion, but a contradiction in terms, to expect that economy could ever satisfy their needs. Economy can indeed produce a lot of commodities and services to relieve a particular set of needs. But as it disvalues and often destroys a whole range of other human activities which, for the majority of people, continue to be vital for meeting their needs, the disabling effects of those relief operations are indeed highly negative in the long run. The overwhelming majority in the world still shape and satisfy their needs thanks to the network of human relationships they preserve within their vernacular spaces, and thanks to the many forms of solidarity, co-operation and reciprocity they develop within their communities. Their activities are generally concrete responses to concrete and immediate problems, enabling the people involved to produce both the changes and the things they need. The modern economy disvalues these activities and presses, or forces, people to abandon them. It seeks to reduce everyone into becoming the agent of an invisible national or world economy, geared only to producing things for whoever can pay for them. In other words, in the name of poverty alleviation, it only forces the poor to work for others rather than for themselves.
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Large scale projects trample the poor Robert McCorquodale, Associate Professor in International and Public Law in the Faculty of Law, The Australian National University. Richard Fairbrother former research assistant to Robert McCorquodale, Human Rights Quarterly 21.3 1999 pg. 735-764.
For most developing states, particularly those in Africa, economic growth is often fostered through large-scale external investment. This investment comes from globalized economic institutions, such as inter-governmental institutions, including the World Bank and the IMF, or transnational corporations. 38 This argument, therefore, concludes that economic growth through globalization leads to the protection of economic rights such as the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to development. However, the reality is somewhat different in most instances. There are at least three reasons for this: the type of investment, the basis for investment decisions, and the type of economic growth. First, a great deal of the investment arising from globalized economic sources for the purposes of "development" is allocated only to certain types of projects, such as the building of dams, roads, and runways, and the creation of large-scale commercial farms. There is little or no investment in primary health care, safe drinking water, and basic education. Furthermore, these globalized investment-based projects "create some risks of (legally cognizable) harm to some categories of project-affected people, and some projects generate many risks of very serious harms to many people." The World Bank itself has recognized the risks involved. With regard to largescale irrigation projects, the World Bank has recognized that: [s]ocial disruption is inevitable in large-scale irrigation projects. . . . Local people often find that they have less access to water, land and vegetation resources as a result of the project. Conflicting demands on water resources and inequalities in distribution can easily occur both in the project area and downstream . . . altering the distribution of wealth.
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absorbers for structural change," noted Susan Davis, WEDO Executive Director. Women in economies in transition, whether in Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, Africa or Latin America, pay a disproportionate share of the costs of economic globalization while being excluded from its benefits. An abhorrent aspect of the global economy is the prostitution of women in a sex industry that spans the world.
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Population Links
Population discourse link to development Arturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.35
The war on poverty was justified on additional rounds, particularly the urgency believed to characterize the "population problem." Statements and positions regarding population began to proliferate. In many instances, a crude form of empiricism was followed, making Malthusian views and prescriptions inevitable, although economists and demographers made serious attempts to conceptualize the effect of demographic factors on development. Models and theories were formulated seeking to relate the various variables and to provide a basis for policy and program formulation. As the experience of the West suggested, it was hoped that growth rates would begin to fall as the countries developed; but as many warned, countries could not wait for this process to occur and should speed up the reduction of fertility by more direct means. To be sure, this preoccupation with population had existed for several decades, especially in relation to Asia. It was a central topic in discussions on race and racism. But the scale and form that the discussion took were new. As one author stated "It is probable that in the last five years more copies have been published of discussions related to population than in all the previous centuries" (Pendell 1951, 377). The discussions held in academic circles or in the ambit of the nascent international organizations also had a new tone: they focused on topics such as the relationship between economic growth and population growth; between population, resources, and output; between cultural factors and birth control. They also took topics such as the demographic experience of the rich countries and its possible extrapolation to the poor ones; the factors affecting human fertility and mortality; population trends and projections for the future; the conditions necessary for successful population control programs; and so on. In other words, in much the same way that was happening with race and racism during the same period- and in spite of the persistence of blatant racist views-the discourses on population were being redeployed within the "scientific" realm provided by demography, public health, and population biology. A new view of population, and of scientific and technological instruments to manage it, was taking shape.
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Environment Links
Turn: environmentalism is only a new excuse for intervention and domination through development Wolfgang Sachs, fellow at Institute for Cultural Studies Essen, Germany, The Development Dictionary, 1993,
p.29 But with spreading deforestation and desertification all over the world, the poor were quickly identified as agents of destruction and became the targets of campaigns to promote `environmental consciousness'. Once blaming the victim had entered the professional consensus, the old recipe could also be offered for meeting the new disaster: since growth was supposed to remove poverty, the environment could only be protected through a new era of growth. As the Brundtland Report puts it: `Poverty reduces people's capacity to use resources in a sustainable manner; it intensifies pressure on the environment .... A necessary but not sufficient condition for the elimination of absolute poverty is a relatively rapid rise in per capita incomes in the Third World'.' The way was thus cleared for the marriage between `environment' and `development': the newcomer could be welcomed to the old-established family. No development without sustainability; no sustainability without development is the formula which establishes the newly formed bond. 'Development' emerges rejuvenated from this liaison, the ailing concept gaining another lease on life. This is nothing less than the repeat of a proven ruse: every time in the last 30 years when the destructive effects of development were recognized, the concept was stretched in such a way as to include both injury and therapy. For example, when it became obvious, around 1970, that the pursuit of development actually intensified poverty, the notion of 'equitable development' was invented so as to reconcile the irreconcilable: the creation of poverty with the abolition of poverty. In the same vein, the Brundtland Report incorporated concern for the environment into the concept of development by erecting `sustainable development' as the conceptual roof for both violating and healing the environment. Certainly, the new era requires development experts to widen their attention span and to monitor water and soils, air and energy utilization. But development remains what it always comes down to, an array of interventions for boosting the GNP: 'given expected population growth a five- to ten-fold increase in world industrial output can be anticipated by the time world population stabilizes sometime in the next century'.' Brundtland thus ends up suggesting further growth, but not any longer, as in the old days of development, in order to achieve the happiness of the greatest number, but to contain the environmental disaster for the generations to come. The threat to the planet's survival looms large. Has there ever been a better pretence for intrusion? New areas of intervention open up, nature becomes a domain of politics, and a new breed of technocrats feels the vocation to steer growth along the edge of the abyss.
Environmentalism inspires an Orwellian system of management Wolfgang Sachs, fellow at Institute for Cultural Studies Essen, Germany, The Development Dictionary, 1993,
p.35 Capital-, bureaucracy-, and science-intensive solutions to environmental decline, in addition, are not without social costs. The Promethean task of keeping the global industrial machine running at ever increasing speed, and safeguarding at the same time the bisophere of the planet, will require a quantum leap in surveillance and regulation. How else should the myriads of decisions, from the individual to the national and the global levels, be brought into line? It is of secondary importance whether the streamlining of industrialism will be achieved, if at all, through market incentives, strict legislation, remedial programmes, sophisticated spying or outright prohibitions. What matters is that all these strategies call for more centralism, in particular for a stronger state. Since eco-crats rarely call in question the industrial model of living in order to reduce the burden on nature, they are left with the necessity of synchronizing the innumerable activities of society with all the skill, foresight and tools of advancing technology they can muster - a prospect which could have inspired Orwell to another novel. The real historical challenge, therefore, must be addressed in something other than eco-cratic terms: how is it possible to build ecological societies with less government and less professional dominance?
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Technology Links
Technology is the hegemonic tool of development Otto Ullrich, engineer and sociologist with Green Party, The Development Dictionary, p. 275, 1993
With the age of development, science and technology took over the leading role altogether. They were regarded as the reason for the superiority of the North and the guarantee of the promise of development. As the `key to prosperity' they were to open up the realm of material surplus and, as the `tools of progress', to lead the countries of the world toward the sunny uplands of the future. No wonder that for decades numerous conferences all over the world and particularly in the United Nations, focused, in a spirit of near religious hopefulness, on the `mighty forces of science and technology'.
Development technologies pillage the environment, including agricultural technology Otto Ullrich, engineer and sociologist with Green Party, The Development Dictionary, p. 275, 1993
But if one takes a look at one after the other of the technologies and technologically created essential goods that appear so alluring, it becomes clear that they overwhelmingly take the form of techniques that plunder the earths resources and externalize their costs. This is true of the massive fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, airplanes and automobiles, washing machines and dishwashers, factories for the production of plastics and the countless plastic products, industrialized and chemicalized agriculture, the industry for the improvement of foodstuffs, the packaging industry, buildings made of concrete, steel and chemicals, paper production, etc., etc. None of these brilliant accomplishments of industrial technology function without the massive consumption of free natural resources and without the expulsion of waste, poisons, noise and stench.
Western technologies crush cultural self-definition and tolerate no alternatives Otto Ullrich, engineer and sociologist with Green Party, The Development Dictionary, p. 275, 1993
Aside from its environmental and physical costs, the social and cultural costs of the introduction of Western technologies also remained largely hidden during the technological enthusiasm of the 1950s and '60s. Even 'clean' technologies force their laws upon society in such a way that cultural self-definition and autonomy cannot be maintained for long. That the import of Western industrial technologies combines a creeping cultural imperialism with the destruction of native culture is related to a little noted characteristic of these technologies. This characteristic is another dimension of their mystification, with its separation of phenomenal form and reality, immediate impact and later effects. The alleged tools of progress are not tools at all, but technical systems that worm their way into every aspect of life and tolerate no alternatives.
Technological solvency is linked to universalistic notions of market truths Gerald Berthoud, prof at U of Lausanne in Paris, The Development Dictionary, 1992, p.71
This normative representation of social regulation is increasingly reinforced by technological innovations in key sectors like information, telecommunications and biogenetics. The clearest result of this process is market dynamism, giving the impression that commoditization has no limits whatsoever. `Can everything be bought and sold?' is a moral question which has been progressively emptied of all meaning. Faith in unlimited expansion follows from the close connection made between technoscience and the market. The former, with its conquest of new social spaces unthinkable not long ago, is seen as irresistible. Under pressure from the ideological success of technology, there is little chance of any effective general acceptance of ethical limits to market expansion. We are all subject to the compelling idea that everything that can be made must be made, and then sold. Our universe appears unshakeably structured by the omnipotence of tech truth and the laws of the market. The middle-class ideal of our time is to establish a fully competitive society, composed of individuals for whom freedom of choice is the only way to express independence from their natural and social environment. But one unavoidable question remains: is not our reductive view - of supposedly independent individuals as the universal future for mankind - ultimately self-deceptive; and are we not thereby misleading the entire world as well as ourselves?
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Turn participatory empowerment re-creates colonialism Larry Lohmann, The Ecologist, Jan-Feb, 1993
Similarly, as Marianne Gronemeyer points out, whereas help used to signify (among other things) a spontaneous response to a cry of pain, it is now something the need for which is determined by aid institutions over peoples heads giving those institutions an excuse for taking over more and more of peoples lives, with deadly results. Participation, too, as Majid Rahnema observes, becomes in the hands of developers little more than a tool for involving the patients in their own care care which can only be provided by the self-application of a global model of progress. And empowerment perhaps predictably, is used: to disempower ordinary people. By suggesting that those to be empowered have no power and must rely on others who have a secret formula for initiating them into it, it lays the ground for a reprise of colonialism.
Turn alternative development is doomed. Only alternatives to development work Serge Latouche, Professor of Economics at University of Paris XI, In the Wake of the Affluent Society: An exploration of Post-Development, 1993, p.158-161
Whether one likes it or not, one can't make development different from what it has been. Development has been and still is the Westernisation of the world. Words are rooted in history; they are linked to ways of seeing and entire cosmologies which very often escape the speaker's consciousness, but which have a hold over our feelings. There are gentle words, words which act as balm to the heart and soul, and words which hurt. There are words which move a whole people and turn everything upside down. Words like liberty and democracy have been such, and still are. And then there are poisonous words which infiltrate into the blood like a drug, perverting desire and blurring judgement. Development is one of these toxic words. One can of course proclaim that from now on, development means the opposite of what it used to. The papal encyclical Populorum Progressio tried to do just this, by appropriating development into a theology which was traditionally hostile to the ideology of Enlightenment and progress. Similarly, if one proclaims that 'good development is primarily putting value on what one's forebears did and being rooted in a culture','8 it amounts to defining a word by its opposite. Development has been and still is primarily an uprooting. One might, similarly, decree that the bloodiest dictatorship be called a democracy, even a popular democracy. This wouldn't prevent the people from clamouring for the reality of a democracy. By the same token, enunciating 'good development' will unfortunately not prevent the techno-economic dynamism relayed by the national authorities and by most NGOs from uprooting people and plunging them into the dereliction of shantytowns. The authentic alternative to underdevelopment is, possibly, in the process of being invented by Third World civil societies, but it certainly is not initiated by development ministries even if the latter, like the road to hell, are paved with good intentions. By placing itself under the banner of development, the alternative movement dons the opposition's colours, hoping perhaps to seduce rather than combat it - but more likely to fall into the abyss itself. In order to avoid misunderstandings and show the oppositions between 'alternative development' and alternatives to development at the level of concrete practice, it is necessary to deal one by one with the main issues and highlight their ambiguities.
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Our alternative is best: participation in the context of development reinforces Eurocentric solutions. Only escaping that context avoids repeating the past Giles Mohan, Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth, and Kristian Stokke, Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Third World Quarterly, v21, issue2, 2000
This paper has argued that the paradoxical consensus over the role of `local participation' in a globalising world is fraught with dangers. Local participation can be used for different purposes by very different ideological stakeholders. It can underplay the role of the state and transnational power holders and can, overtly or inadvertently, cement Eurocentric solutions to Third World development. There is a need for critical analyses of the political use of `the local', but also a need to develop a political imaginary that does not repeat these weaknesses.
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Development extermination
Development pillages its victims with a discourse of Western superiority. Temporary gains are doomed to be turned back by greater poverty and cultural destruction. The focus on progress is the cause of wars and tyrannies. Zygmunt Bauman, University Of Leeds Professor Emeritus Of Sociology, Life In Fragments: Essays In Postmodern Morality, 95, p. 29-33
To quote Lyotard again: humanity is divided into two parts. One confronts the challenge of complexity, the other confronts the ancient, terrible challenge of survival. This is perhaps the principal aspect of the failure of the modern project . . .It is not the absence of progress, but on the contrary the development -techno-scientific, artistic, economic, political - which made possible the total wars, totalitarianisms, the widening gap between the riches of the North and poverty of the South, unemployment and the `new poor' . . .Lyotard's conclusion is blunt and damning: `it has become impossible to legitimize development by the promise of the emancipation of humanity in its totality.''' Yet it was exactly that `emancipation' - from want, `low standards of life', paucity of needs, doing what the community has done rather than `being able' to do whatever one may still wish in the future (`able' in excess of present wishes) - that loomed vaguely behind Harry Truman's 1947 declaration of war on `underdevelopment'. Since then, unspeakable sufferings have been visited upon the extant `earth economies' of the world in the name of happiness, identified now with the `developed', that is modern, way of life. Their delicately balanced livelihood which could not survive the condemnation of simplicity, frugality, acceptance of human limits and respect for non-human forms of life, now lies in ruin, yet no viable, locally realistic alternative is in sight. The victims of `development' - the true Giddensian juggernaut which crushes everything and everybody that happens to stand in its way - `shunned by the advanced sector and cut off from the old ways . . . are expatriates in their own countries.'" Wherever the juggernaut has passed, know-how vanishes, to be replaced by a dearth of skills; commodified labour appears where men and women once lived; tradition becomes an awkward ballast and a costly burden; common utilities turn into underused resources, wisdom into prejudice, wise men into bearers of superstitions.
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Alternative: criticism
Criticism of development discourse free us from the colonization of reality Arturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.5
Above all, however, it is about how the Third World has been produced by the discourses and practices of development since their inception in the early post-World War II period. Until the late 1970s, the central stake in discussions on Asia, Africa, and Latin America was the nature of development. As we will see, from the economic development theories of the 1950s to the basic human needs approach of the 1970s- which emphasized not only economic growth per se as in earlier decades but also the distribution of the benefits of growth- the main preoccupation of theorists and politicians was the kinds of development that needed to be pursued to solve the social and economic problems of these parts of the world. Even those who opposed the prevailing capitalist strategies were obliged to couch their critique in terms of the need for development, through concepts such as another development, participatory development, socialist development, and the like. In short, one could criticize a given approach and propose modifications or improvements accordingly, but the fact of development itself, and the need for it, could not be doubted. Development had achieved the status of a certainty in the social imaginary. Indeed, it seemed impossible to conceptualize social reality in other terms. Wherever one looked, one found the repetitive and omnipresent reality of development: governments designing and implementing ambitious development plans, institutions carrying out development programs in city and countryside alike, experts of all kinds studying underdevelopment and producing theories ad nauseam. The fact that most peoples conditions not only did not improve but deteriorated with the passing of time did not seem to bother most experts. Reality, in sum, had been colonized by the development discourse, and those who were dissatisfied with this state of affairs had to struggle for bits and pieces of freedom within it, in the hope that in the process a different reality could be constructed. More recently, however, the development of new tools of analysis, in gestation since the late 1960s but the application of which became widespread only during the 1980s, has made possible analyses of this type of colonization of reality which seek to account for this very fact: how certain representations become dominant and shape indelibly the ways in which reality is imagined and acted upon. Foucaults work on the dynamics of discourse and power in the representation of social reality, in particular, has been instrumental in unveiling the mechanisms by which a certain order of discourse produces permissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others impossible. Extensions of Foucaults insights to colonial and postcolonial situations by authors such as Edward Said, V.Y. Mudimbe, Chandra Mohanty, and Homi Bhabha, among others, have opened up new ways of thinking about representations of the Third World. Anthropologys self-critique and renewal during the 1980s have also been important in this regard. Thinking of development in terms of discourse makes it possible to maintain the focus on domination- as earlier Marxist analyses, for instance, did- and at the same time to explore more fruitfully the conditions of possibility and the most pervasive effects of development. Discourse analysis creates the possibility of stand[ing] detached from [the development discourse], bracketing its familiarity, in order to analyze the theoretical and practical context with which it has been associated (Foucault 1986, 3). It gives us the possibility of singling out development as an encompassing cultural space and at the same time of separating ourselves from it by perceiving it in a totally new from. This is the task the present book sets out to accomplish.
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Alternative: deconstruction
The critiques alternative is a social practice challenging development Arturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.14
As this short review shows, there are already a small but relatively coherent number of works that contribute to articulating a discursive critique of development. The present work makes the most general case in this regard; it seeks to provide a general view of the historical construction of development and the Third World as a whole and exemplifies the way the discourse functions in one particular case. The goal of the analysis is to contribute to the liberation of the discursive field so that the task of imagining alternatives can be commenced (or perceived by researchers in a new light) in those spaces where the production of scholarly and expert knowledge for development purposes continues to take place. The local-level ethnographies of development mentioned earlier provide useful elements toward this end. In the conclusion, I extend the insights these works afford and attempt to elaborate a view of the alternative as a research question and a social practice.
The critique is the alternative; deconstructing developments discourse opens space for cultural difference Arturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.223
Said differently, the nature of alternatives as a research question and a social practice can be most fruitfully gleaned from the specific manifestations of such alternatives in concrete local settings. The alternative is, in a sense, always there. From this perspective, there is not surplus of meaning at the local level but meanings that have to be read with new senses, tools, and theories. The deconstruction of development, coupled with the local ethnographies just mentioned, can be important elements for a new type of visibility and audibility of forms of cultural difference and hybridization that researchers have generally glossed over until now. The subaltern do in fact speak, even if the audibility of their voices in the circles where "the West" is reflected upon and theorized is tenuous at best. There is also the question of the translatability into theoretical and practical terms of what might be read, heard, smelled, felt, or intuited in Third World settings. This process of translation has to move back and forth between concrete proposals based on existing cultural differences-with the goal of strengthening those differences by inserting them into political strategies and self-defined and self directed socioeconomic experiments-and the opening of spaces for destabilizing dominant modes of knowing, so that the need for the most violent forms of translation is diminished. In other words, the process must embrace the challenge of simultaneously seeing theory as a set of contested forms of knowledge-originating in many cultural matrices-and have that theory foster concrete interventions by the groups in question.The crisis in the regimes of representation of the Third World thus calls for new theories and research strategies; the crisis is a real conjunctional moment in the reconstruction of the connection between truth and reality, between words and things, one that demands new practices of seeing, knowing, and being. Ethnography is by no means the sole method of pursuing this goal; but given the need to unmake and unlearn development, and if one recognizes that the crucial insights for the pursuit of alternatives will be ' found not in academic circles-critical or conventional-or in the offices of institutions such as the World Bank but in a new reading of popular practices and of the reappropriation by popular actors of the space of hegemonic sociocultural production, then one must at least concede that the task of conceptualizing alternatives must include a significant contact with those whose "alternatives" research is supposed to illuminate. This is a conjunctural possibility that ethnography-oriented research might be able to fulfill, regardless of the discipline.
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A2: Agency
No link their ev says we shouldnt deny the plan to the South, which isnt competitive with our criticism. We just say you shouldnt frame it as development. We dont deny the potential for people to rebel against imperialism, we just say they shouldnt have to. Turn - we say that we think their framing is oppressive, but their claim that Africans want the plan is an attempt to speak for those others Arturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.153
As Michael Taussig (1987, 135) said, From the represented shall come that which overturns the representation. He continues, commenting on the absence of the narratives of South American indigenous peoples from most representations about them, It is the ultimate anthropological conceit, anthropology in its highest, indeed redemptive, moment, rescuing the voice of the Indian from the obscurity of pain and time (135). This is to say that as much as the plain exclusion of the peasants voice in rural development discourse, this conceit to speak for the others, perhaps even to rescue their voice, as Taussig says, must be avoided. The fact that violence is a cultural manifestation of hunger applies not only to hungers physical aspects but to the violence of representation. The development discourse has turned its representations of hunger into an act of consumption of images and feelings by the well nourished, an act of cannibalism, as Cinema Novo artists would have it. This consumption is a feature of modernity, we are reminded by Foucault (1975, 84) (It is just that the illness of some should be transformed into the experience of others). But the regimes of representation that produce this violence are not easily neutralized, as the next chapter will show.
Development kills imagining of alternatives and enslaves people; it reduces people into numbers in an equation and destroys their agency Arturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.44
The most important exclusion, however, was and continues to be what development was supposed to be all about: people. Development was- and continues to be for the most part- a top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach, which treated people and cultures as abstract concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of progress. Development was conceived not as a cultural process (culture was a residual variable, to disappear with the advance of modernization) but instead as a system of more or less universally applicable technical interventions intended to deliver some badly needed goods to a target population. It comes as no surprise that development became a force so destructive to Third World cultures, ironically in the name of peoples interests.
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A2: Agency
Development can never allow agency: the discourse chooses who can speak and what can be said before the conversation starts Arturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.40-1
Development was not merely the result of the combination, study, or gradual elaboration of these elements (some of these topics had existed for some time); nor the product of the introduction of new ideas (some of which were already appearing or perhaps were bound to appear); nor the effect of the new international organizations or financial institutions (which had some predecessors, such as the League of Nations). It was rather the result of the establishment of a set of relations among these elements, institutions, and practices and of the systematization of these relations to form a whole. The development discourse was constituted not by the array of possible objects under its domain but by the way in which, thanks to this set of relations, it was able to form systematically the objects of which it spoke, to group them and arrange them in certain ways, and to give them a unity of their own. To understand development as a discourse, one must look not at the elements themselves but at the system of relations established among them. It is this system that allows the systematic creation of objects, concepts, and strategies it determines what can be thought and said. These relations established between institutions, socioeconomic processes, forms of knowledge, technological factors, and so on- define the conditions under which objects, concepts, theories, and strategies can be incorporated into the discourse. In sum, the system of relations establishes a discursive practice that sets the rules of the game: who can speak, from what points of view, with what authority, and according to what criteria of expertise; it sets the rules that must be followed for this or that problem, theory or object to emerge and be named, analyzed, and eventually transformed into a policy or a plan.
We dont deny agency, the discourse is too fluid Jonathan Crush, Professor of Geography at Queens University, The Power of Development, 1995, p. 8
Development, for all its power to speak and to control the terms of speaking, has never been impervious to challenge and resistance, nor, in response, to reformulation and change. In a startling reversal, Fanon (1968) once argued that 'Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.' There is a great deal about the form and content of development that suggests that it is reactive as well as formative. As a set of ideas about the way the world works and should be ordered, understood and governed, development should also be glimpsed if not as 'the creation of the Third World,' then certainly as reflecting the responses, reactions and resistance of the people who are its object. Without the possibility of reaction and resistance, there is no place for the agents and victims of development to exert their explicit and implicit influence on the ways in which it is constructed, thought, planned and implemented. Put simply, we simply do not yet know enough about the global, regional and especially local historical geographies of development - as an idea, discipline, strategy or site of resistance - to say much with any certainty about its complex past.
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A2: Masking
Turn they put a smiley face on development, allowing perpetual masking Serge Latouche, University Of Paris XI Professor of Economics, In The Wake of the Affluent Society: An exploration of post development, 1993, p. 149
The most dangerous solicitations, the sirens with the most insidious song, are not those of true blue and hard development, but rather those of what is called alternative development. This term can in effect encompass any hope or ideal that one might wish to project into the harsh realities of existence. The fact that it presents a friendly exterior makes alternative development all the more dangerous. It hides fatal traps and ambushes which are made even harder to sniff out and bring to light by the fact that those involved in alternative development happily adopt all the criticisms made about non-alternative development, so-called mal-development. So the analyst has to be very much on guard to avoid all the booby traps; good intentions are, unfortunately, not enough. As Ivan Illich notes, redefining development serves only to reinforce the Western economic domination of the shape of formal economics by the professional colonization of the informal sector, domestic and foreign.
Refusing the term leaves no room for the development enterprise to hide New Internationalist, issue 232, June, 1992
http://www.oneworld.org/ni/issue232/action.htm Whenever you encounter the word development try and substitute another word or phrase that makes it clearer what is meant. Development can mean anything to anybody, with the result that people with very different agendas (the IMF and the NI, for example) can feel safe under its banner. As an example we looked at the line The people, the ideas, the action in the fight for world development which has appeared on the magazines front cover since its early years. We concluded that the best substitute word in this case would be justice (the IMF would be unlikely to choose the same translation).
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A2: Perm
The perm can't cleanse development's evils: it makes domination more efficient Sachs, 95 (Wolfgang Sachs, Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies in Essen, Germany, Deep Ecology for the
21st Century, 1995) Development is, above all, a way of thinking. It cannot, therefore, be easily identified with a particular strategy or program, but ties many different practices and aspirations to a common set of assumptions Despite alarming signs of failure throughout its history, the development syndrome has survived until today, but at the price of increasing senility. When it became clear in the 1950s that investments were not enough, man-power development was added to the aid package; as it became obvious in the 1960s that hardship continued, social development was discovered; and in the 1990s, as the impoverishment of peasants could no longer be overlooked, rural development was included in the arsenal of development strategies. And so it went on, with further creations like equitable development and the basic needs approach. Again and again, the same conceptual operation was repeated: degradation in the wake of development was redefined as a lack which called for yet another strategy of development. All along, the efficacy of development remained impervious to any counterevidence, but showed remarkable staying power; the concept was repeatedly stretched until it included both the strategy which inflicted the injury and the strategy designed for therapy. This strength of the concept, however, is also the reason for its galloping exhastion; it no longer manifests any reactions to changing historical conditions. The tragic greatness of development consists in the monumental emptiness.
Nothing positive can be salvaged form the 1AC. Even positive speech is framed by their ability to choose who speaks and who is not heard
Arturo Escobar, assoc prof of anthropology at University of Mass, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 1995, p.40-1 Development was not merely the result of the combination, study, or gradual elaboration of these elements (some of these topics had existed for some time); nor the product of the introduction of new ideas (some of which were already appearing or perhaps were bound to appear); nor the effect of the new international organizations or financial institutions (which had some predecessors, such as the League of Nations). It was rather the result of the establishment of a set of relations among these elements, institutions, and practices and of the systematization of these relations to form a whole. The development discourse was constituted not by the array of possible objects under its domain but by the way in which, thanks to this set of relations, it was able to form systematically the objects of which it spoke, to group them and arrange them in certain ways, and to give them a unity of their own. To understand development as a discourse, one must look not at the elements themselves but at the system of relations established among them. It is this system that allows the systematic creation of objects, concepts, and strategies it determines what can be thought and said. These relations established between institutions, socioeconomic processes, forms of knowledge, technological factors, and so on- define the conditions under which objects, concepts, theories, and strategies can be incorporated into the discourse. In sum, the system of relations establishes a discursive practice that sets the rules of the game: who can speak, from what points of view, with what authority, and according to what criteria of expertise; it sets the rules that must be followed for this or that problem, theory or object to emerge and be named, analyzed, and eventually transformed into a policy or a plan.
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A2: Re-appropriation
Development is a loaded word which is inseparable from the web of meaning it imparts. Incanting the term enslaves two thirds of the earths inhabitants by implying favorable change. Gustavo Esteva, former chair of ANADEGES, The Development Dictionary, p.9, 1993
Development cannot delink itself from the words with which it was formed growth, evolution, maturation. Just the same, those who now use the word cannot free themselves from a web of meanings that impart a specific blindness to their language, thought and action. No matter the context in which it is used, or the precise connotation that the person using it wants to give it, the expression becomes qualified and coloured by meanings perhaps unwanted. The word always implies a favourable change, a step from the simple to the complex, from the inferior to the superior, from the worse to the better. The word indicates that one is doing well because one is advancing in the sense of a necessary, ineluctable, universal law and toward a desirable goal. The word retains to this day the meaning given to it a century ago by the creator of ecology, Haeckel: `Development is, from this moment on, the magic word with which we will solve all the mysteries that surround us or, at least, that which will guide us toward their solution. But for two-thirds of the people on earth, this positive meaning of the word `development' - profoundly rooted after two centuries of its social construction - is a reminder of what they are not. It is a reminder of an undesirable, undignified condition. To escape from it, they need to be enslaved to others' experiences and dreams.
Re-appropriation is just another way to re-enforce the dominant notions of development. The word itself in any form is incompatible with the kritik Serge Latouche, University Of Paris XI Professor of Economics, In The Wake of the Affluent Society: An exploration of post development, 1993, p. 149
The most dangerous solicitations, the sirens with the most insidious song, are not those of true blue and hard development, but rather those of what is called alternative development. This term can in effect encompass any hope or ideal that one might wish to project into the harsh realities of existence. The fact that it presents a friendly exterior makes alternative development all the more dangerous. It hides fatal traps and ambushes which are made even harder to sniff out and bring to light by the fact that those involved in alternative development happily adopt all the criticisms made about non-alternative development, so-called mal-development. So the analyst has to be very much on guard to avoid all the booby traps; good intentions are, unfortunately, not enough. As Ivan Illich notes, redefining development serves only to reinforce the Western economic domination of the shape of formal economics by the professional colonization of the informal sector, domestic and foreign.
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A2: Re-appropriation
Development cant be re-appropriated. Scrapping the old conceptual framework is always better Harry M. Cleaver, Jr., professor of economics at UT-Austin, May 3, 1995
http://www.cs.unb.ca/~alopez-o/politics/NAFTAmail/msg00023.html I agree that, at least at level of the choice of language, there is a real problem with using the word "development". The problem is above all its heavy, historically accumulated, load of ambiguity. The word has meant so many things to so many different people, that when we use the word we wind up talking about the word instead of what we want to be talking about, namely how peoples lives can be made better, or what is preventing them from achieving such improvement (however defined). There is a very nice essay by Gustavo Esteva on the problems associated with this word "development" in a book I have refered to before: Wolfgang Sachs (ed) THE DEVELOPMENT DICTIONARY, London:Zed, 1992. Among other points, Gustavo make one which you do: that the concept development has increasinly been associated with movement toward some ideal model. He traces the evolution from its biological origins through its application to the social sphere in the 18th Century to the present. His primary concern, however, is the use of the term in the Post WWII era as "development" became the goal and "underdevelopment" the scourge of humankind. In a paper I wrote for a conference in Mexico some years back (1985, just after the earthquake), I discussed another of your points, namely that part of the Cold War involved a struggle between "two models of development", i.e., capitalist and socialist, but argued, as I have been doing in this thread, that the two models were really only variations on a common core and neither led anywhere beyond the current morass of exploitation, brutality and suffering with which we are all too familiar. You ask "Can we escape from this logic?" I think the answer is yes, we can, that increasing numbers of people are finding/creating paths out of the morass that open into other kinds of relationships. If we take seriously the idea that concepts not only do, but must, evolve with the evolution (and revolutions) of history, then we should also see that WE can be involved in engineering that conceptual evolution. And the best way to do that is often not to look for some new adjective to hang onto an old concept (e.g., nowadays people want to hang "sustainable" rather than "capitalist" or "socialist" onto "development") but to scrap the old concept and look for new ones. Forget the jargon and return to the vernacular and find new ways of expressing new desires. This is less likely to be a good idea when you are analysing new variations of old processes and relationships than it is when you are striking out for something new. For example "neoliberal capitalism" is not a bad name for contemporary capitalist policy because it still IS capitalism, just with a new twist. But when we want to think about avoiding being twisted, we often do well to scrap jetison the old jargon and start fresh.
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***AFF ANSWERS
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Development 2AC
Turn: the critique is insufficient, but we re-appropriate capitalism to work for the oppressed Arun Agrawal, assistant professor of political science at Yale University, Peace & Change, Oct 96, Vol. 21 Issue
4, p464, 14p. The stance of this reviewer may be summarized as "I will engage, I must critique"--in contrast to the poststructuralist position of "I will critique, I will reject." Throughout this essay, I have tried to highlight the two dilemmas inherent in adopting a poststructuralist stance. One is led either to a position that repeats one's initial assumptions, or one is forced into contradictions that result from questioning metanarratives. In response, I suggest two small strategic shifts for poststructuralist scholars, the first of which can already be witnessed in the work of Stacy Leigh Pigg.[9] Instead of avowing an explicit commitment to poststructuralism and calling for a repudiation of "development," it might be far more fruitful to examine the ways in which attempts by the state to foster development are often used as instruments of legitimation and extension of political control, yet also often engender resistance and protest. It was Foucault, after all, who pointed to the positive as well as the negative aspects of power.[10] A second productive move might be to accept the impossibility of questioning all metanarratives and instead to rethink how development can be profitably contested from within as well as from outside. Persistent criticisms of "development" are indispensable; calls to go beyond it make sense primarily as signifiers of romantic utopian thinking. In posing the dualisms of local and global, indigenous and Western, traditional and scientific, society and state--and locating the possibility of change only in one of these opposed pairs--one is forced to draw lines that are potentially ridiculous, and ultimately indefensible.[11] Development, like progress, rationality, or modernity, may be impossible to give up. Harboring the seeds of its own transformation, it may be far more suited to co-optation than disavowal. Rather than fearing the co-optation by "development" of each new strategy of change, it may be time to think about how to co-opt "development." "[R]eversing, displacing, and seizing the apparatus of value-coding"[12] is not just the task of the postcolonial position; it is the impossible task of all critical positions.
No alternative. The attempt to invent one does worse violence by obscuring history. The term can only be criticized from within Jonathan Crush, Professor of Geography at Queens University, The Power of Development, 1995, p. 19-20
Deploying Derrida's concept of logocentrism, Manzo proceeds to argue that romantic images of indigenous societies and their authentic knowledges do not push beyond modern relations of domination and threaten to reinscribe them in their most violent form. Hence, 'efforts in the post-colonial world to reinvent a precolonial Eden that never existed in fact, have been no less violent in their scripting of identity than those that practise domination in the name of development.' This trap - the reinscription of modernist dualisms - is also inherent in any claim that there can be pristine counter- hegemonic discourses of anti-development which are implacably opposed and totally untainted by the language of development itself. Here Foucault's notion or the 'tactical polyvalence of discourses' seems particularly useful. He argues (Foucault 1990: 100-1) that we should not imagine a world of dominant and dominated, or accepted and excluded, discourses. We should think instead of a 'complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling- block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy.'
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Development 2AC
Their alternative replicates domination. Posting a new framing only asserts their status as all-knowing creators of truth and justice Jonathan Crush, Professor of Geography at Queens University, The Power of Development, 1995, p. 18-19
Is there a way of writing (speaking or thinking) beyond the language of development? Can its hold on the imagination of both the powerful and the powerless be transcended? Can we get round, what Watts calls, the 'develop- ment gridlock'? Can, as Escobar puts it, the idea of 'catching up' with the West be drained of its appeal? Any contemporary volume of development- related essays can no longer afford to ignore these questions. One of the most damaging criticisms levelled against Said's (1978) notion of Orientalism is that it provides no basis for understanding how that discourse can be overcome. This book also, by definition, cannot stand outside the phenomenon being analysed. The text itself is made possible by the languages of development and, in a sense, it contributes to their perpetuation. To imagine that the Western scholar can gaze on development from above as a distanced and impartial observer, and formulate alternative ways of thinking and writing, is simply a conceit. To claim or adopt such a position is simply to replicate a basic rhetorical strategy of development itself. What we can do, as a first step, is to examine critically the rival claims of those who say that the language of development can, or is, being transcended. To assert, like Esteva (1987: 135), that 'development stinks' is all very well, but it is not that helpful if we have no idea about how the odour will be erased.
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Agency
They deny the agency of the South. To them, those outside of the West could never conceive of the plan Nederveen Pieterse, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Jan 21, Third World Quarterly, 2 p. 175
According to Escobar (1992), the problem with development is that it is external, based on the model of the industrialized world, and what is needed instead are more endogenous discourses. The assertion of endogenous development calls to mind dependency theory and the foreign bad, local good position (Kiely, 1999). According to Rajni Kothari, where colonialism left off, development took over (1988: 143). This view is as old as the critique of modernisation theory. It calls to mind the momentum and pathos of decolonisation and the familiar cultural homogenisation thesis, according to which Western media, advertising and consumerism induce cultural uniformity. All this may be satisfying as the sound of a familiar tune, but it is also one-sided and old-hat. In effect, it denies the agency of the Third World. It denies the extent to which the South also owns development. Several recent development perspectivessuch as dependency theory, alternative development and human developmenthave originated to a considerable extent in the South. Furthermore, what about Easternisation, as in the East Asian model, touted by the World Bank as a development miracle? What about Japanisation, as in the Japanese challenge, the influence of Japanese management technique and Toyotism (Kaplinsky, 1994)? At any rate, Westernisation is a catch all concept that ignores diverse historical currents. Latouche and others use the bulky category the West which, given the sharp historical differences between Europe and North America is not really meaningful. This argument also overlooks more complex assessments of globalisation (eg Nederveen Pieterse, 1995). A more appropriate analytics is polycentrism. Here the rejoinder to Eurocentrism is not Third Worldism but a recognition that multiple centres, also in the South, now shape development discourse (e.g. Amin, 1989; Nederveen Pieterse 1991).
Their criticism patronizes and denies agency P.T. Bauer (Lord Bauer) is professor emeritus, London School of Economics, Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, Fellow of the British Academy, From Subsistence to Exchange and other essays, 2000, p. 71-72.
The allegations that external contacts damage the Third World are plainly condescending. They clearly imply that Third World people do not know what is good for them nor even what they want. The image of the Third World as a uniform stagnant mass devoid of distinctive character is another aspect of this condescension. It reflects a stereotype which denies identity, character, personality, and responsibility to the individuals and societies of the Third World. Because the Third World is defined as the whole world with the exception of the West and a handful of Westernised societies (such as Japan and South Africa) it is regarded as if it were all much of a muchness. Time and again the guilt merchants envisage the Third World as an undifferentiated, passive entity, helplessly at the mercy of its environment and of the powerful West. The exponents of Western guilt further patronize the Third World by suggesting that its economic fortunes past, present, and prospective, are determined by the West; that past exploitation by the West explains Third World backwardness; that manipulation of international trade by the West and other forms of Western misconduct account for persistent poverty; that the economic future of the Third World depends largely on Western donadons. According to this set of ideas, whatever happens to the Third World is largely our doing. Such ideas make us feel superior even while we beat our breasts.
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Homogenization / agency
Turn: Their essentialization of the plan as more of the same replicates Eurocentrism: To them, no local knowledge could ever conceive of debt relief Mark T. Berger, The University of New South Wales, Third World Quarterly, Dec 95, Vol. 16 Issue 4, p717, 12p
Escobar's failure to ground his analysis of the vicissitudes of the dominant development discourse in the history of the Cold War is a major shortcoming of his overall attempt to map the rise of an increasingly global discourse on development. In a broader sense his minimalist approach to the changing contours of the international political economy gives the dominant discourse on development an overly homogenous and autonomous quality. This is further exacerbated by a lack of analysis of the various institutions which provide the main nexus for the development discourse. For example, his discussion of the World Bank, which looms large in his study, makes only the most limited attempt to locate it in relation to changing post-1945 international power relations. There is also, somewhat surprisingly, a complete absence of any discussion of the significance of the end of the Cold War. Furthermore, the industrial rise of East Asia, the shift in the global politico-economic balance which it embodies, and the discursive significance of the East Asian Miracle in relation to the dominant discourse on development is also ignored.[8] Despite the emergence of a dynamic 'new' East Asian capitalist model, Escobar's analysis continues to hold up Western ideas and power as the main problem and his whole project is framed around a distinction between the global power of the Western model vis-a-vis local Third World efforts at resistance. Even though he introduces the concept of hybridity at the end of his book, and also acknowledges the imprecision of the term the West, Escobar repeatedly invokes the West and Western in a fashion which reinforces a relatively fixed conception of international power relations (p 224). Ironically, this reflects a form of the very eurocentrism his wider project seeks to overturn. Given Escobar's apparent privileging of international power relations (which will be discussed in more detail below) his neglect of the rise of East Asia and the end of the Cold War is particularly surprising.
They deny many indigenous movements which challenge traditional development by making it their own Md Anisur Rahman, Peoples Self-Development: Perspectives on Participatory Action Research, economist who headed the ILOs Programme on Participatory Organizations for the Rural Poor, 1993, p. 213-4
I had no problem in agreeing with this critique of 'development'. But I was struck by the intensity with which the very notion of 'development' was attacked. It was asserted that the notion of development is an 'opium for the people' which legitimises the exercise of power by dominating structures and creates dependence of people and societies upon them, and which destroys the vernacular domain in which the people could evolve authentically. (The term 'people' is used to refer to those sections of the population who have no economic or social status in society by the standards of the dominating structures - those whom Adam Smith referred to as workers and 'other inferior ranks of people'.) Granting this, I argued that we should have the right to give and assert our own conception of the term 'development'. I submitted that I found the word 'development' to be a very powerful means of expressing the conception of societal progress as the flowering of people's creativity. Must we abandon valuable words because they are abused? What do we do then with words like democracy, cooperation, socialism, all of which are being abused? The debate was inconclusive. But it was a revealing indication to me that at least in some societies pro-people forces do not assess that they have the power to use the word 'development' to their advantage even by redefining it. This is perhaps not yet a universal phenomenon, and we know of authentic popular movements which are using the notion of 'development' as they conceive it, as a motive force in their initiatives and struggle. This throws us, social scientists, the challenge to understand and articulate what development might mean to people who have not lost their sense of identity and are expressing themselves through authentic collective endeavours, and also to understand how such a sense of identity and collective self- expression could be restored to others who may have lost them: in other words, to articulate an alternative development paradigm in which the evolution of popular life is not to be distorted and abused by paternalistic 'development' endeavours with alien conceptions but may be stimulated and assisted to find its highest self-expression which alone can make a society proud of itself.
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Re-appropriation
Turn. We re-appropriate development. The kritik is myopic Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Hague Institute of Social Studies, Third World Quarterly, v21, n2, 2000
Post-development thinking is fundamentally uneven. For all the concern with discourse analysis, the actual use of language is sloppy and indulgent. Escobar plays games of rhetoric: in referring to development as `Development' and thus suggesting its homogeneity and consistency, he essentialises `development'. The same applies to Sachs and his call to do away with development: `in the very call for banishment, Sachs implicitly suggests that it is possible to arrive at an unequivocal definition' (Crush, 1996: 3). Apparently this kind of essentialising of `development' is necessary in order to arrive at the radical repudiation of development, and without this anti-development pathos, the post-development perspective loses its foundation. At times one has the impression that post-development turns on a language game rather than an analysis. Attending a conference entitled `Towards a post-development age', Anisur Rahman reacted as follows: `I was struck by the intensity with which the very notion of "development" was attacked . . . I submitted that I found the word "development" to be a very powerful means of expressing the conception of societal progress as the flowering of people's creativity. Must we abandon valuable words because they are abused? What to do then with words like democracy, cooperation, socialism, all of which are abused?' (1993: 213-214)
We give people the opportunity to own development. Indigenous people dont reject the concept they demand freedom to pursue it on their own Kathy Seton, graduate of Queensland University in Brisbane, Center for World Indigenous Studies, 1999, Fourth
World Nations in the Era of Globalisation An Introduction to Contemporary theorizing Posed by Indigenous Nations, Fourth World Journal, http://www.cwis.org/fwj/41/fworld.html Much of the political activism of indigenous nations is directed towards the rhetorical issues that underpin their on-going marginalisation. Their demand for inclusion in "global civic discourse" (Wilmer 1993:36) directly challenges and deconstructs the meaning of normative international assumptions and values surrounding the concepts of modernisation, progress and development advanced by the imperialist culture of States: In confronting and challenging the legitimacy of policies resulting in forced assimilation, relocation, the introduction of deadly alien epidemics, and the sanctioning of private violence by settlers, indigenous peoples have targeted the source - the meaning of development itself. For instance, representatives of the indigenous Yanomamo people in Brazil travelled to the World Bank in the 1980s and argued before Bank officials that "development can have many meanings. Your interpretation of development is material. Ours is spiritual. Spiritual development is as legitimate as material development." (Wilmer 1993:37; see also Dallam 1991). Indigenous nations do not simply oppose modernization or progress. Instead, they assert the right to define and pursue development and progress in a manner compatible with their own cultural contexts. They champion the right to choose the scale and terms of their interaction with other cultures. In order to achieve and secure cultural, political and economic rights, sovereignty and self-determination have become some of the most important values sought by the international movement of indigenous nations. The rise of Fourth World theory offers one of the greatest challenges theorist will have to contend with this century.
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Crack to development
Our notion of development weakens traditional development Marc DuBois, adaptation of a masters thesis presented to the Institute of Social Studies, Alternatives, 16, 1991, p.
2 A minority within this broad alternative movement, however, has gone further than the restdefying the economistic essentialism of development thinking and, perhaps most importantly, challenging the preeminence of the development expert. The core of arguments in this vein is that the theoretical models underlying development efforts stray dramatically far from being as value-free as they are presented. Critical of a development based upon Western experience, this sort of alternative program emphasizes self-reliance, local participation, endogenous patterns of development, and satisfying basic needs. These features outline an interesting approach to development, but their most important contribution lies elsewherein the establishment of opposition to the venerated external aid/technical transfer approach to problems of underdevelopment. In other words, this alternative program gives birth to a competing paradigm of policy formulation, which in turn weakens the authority of the prevailing paradigm.
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Turn: Development Has To Be Critiqued From Within Katy Gardner, University Of Sussex, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute v. 2 (Mar. '96) p. 171
In this book Arturo Escobar reformulates the 'development as neo-colonialism stance in terms of discourse theory. This, he argues: 'gives us the possibility of singling out "development" as an encompassing social space and at the same time of separating ourselves from it by perceiving it in a totally new form (p. 6). Drawing upon Foucault's work on representation, knowledge and power, Escobar argues that development should be understood as a historically specific representation of social reality which permits particular modes of thinking and doing, whilst disqualifying others. This involves specific forms of knowledge, systems of power which regulate practice, and subjectivities by which people recognize themselves as developed or undeveloped. It also consists of particular perceptual domains of inquiry, registration of problems and forms of intervention. A key example is the 'discovery of poverty after the second world war. The management of this required interventions in the newly labelled 'developing countries in health, employment, morality and so forth, as well as new fields of empirical study and theory (for example development economics). Such is the hegemonic power of development discourse that it can only ever be criticized from within; those opposed to it can only propose modifications or improvements, for 'development (has) achieved the status of a certainty in the social imaginary (p. 5).Encountering development is an important contribution to the anthropology of development. Whilst Escobar is not alone in deconstructing development discourse (e.g. Ferguson 1990; Esteva 1992) this book, which summarizes and builds upon articles published over the last decade, is likely to become a definitive statement. Escobar makes his case bodly: he is not afraid of sweeping claims, nor of vivid -- and sometimes polemical -prose. Whilst his argument is largely convincing, this, plus his tendency to generalize, at times undermines it. Throughout the text 'development is largely spoken of as if it were a homogeneous, unitary set of representations and practices, epitomized and led by the World Bank. Whilst undoubtedly extremely powerful, the World Bank however only represents a certain type of developmental institution; many northern and southern nongovernmental organizations utilize significantly different knowledges and practices. Groups and individuals within institutions are also rarely in agreement over what 'development should involve. Thus whilst at one level reports can be read as discursive representations which organize their subjects in certain ways, at another they can be analysed in terms of the internal dynamics of agencies, the results of complex processes and negotiations. This more subtle and nuanced understanding of how power works within the aid industry, and how the discourse is contested from within is largely ignored. Escobar's view of hegemony is also somewhat slippery. At one level he argues that whilst new objects of development such as 'women and 'the environment may have been introduced in recent years, or particular projects modified, the system of relations remains essentially the same, allowing the discourse to adapt to new conditions without being fundamentally challenged. Yet later in the text (for example in a rather disappointing discussion of 'Women in development ) he [Escobar]acknowledges that changes from within might be possible, that relations of power can shift. Indeed, to maintain that nothing has ever changed is to remain blinkered to the highly complex ways in which meanings and practices are negotiated within development: the growth in power of social advisors, who challenge the discourses of economists within Britain's Overseas Development Administration is just one small example.
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Monolithic
Their construction of development as monolithic destroys agency. Development means different things to different people R.D. Grillo, School of African and Asian Studies, University of Sussex, 1997, Discourses of Development, p. 2022 While not denying the validity of the idea of a 'development gaze', we should note its limits. Mosse (this volume, p. 280) says, I am not suggesting that development institutions (irrigation bureaucracies or donor agencies) are the creators of social theory, merely that they constrain and select theory [and] nudge the thinking of their members in particular directions -...' There is a tendency - illustrated, for example, by Hobart, Escobar and to a lesser degree Ferguson - to see development as a monolithic enterprise, heavily controlled from the top, convinced of the superiority of its own wisdom and impervious to local knowledge, or indeed common-sense experience, a single gaze or voice which is all-powerful and beyond influence. This underpins what I would call the 'myth of development' which pervades much critical writing in this field. It might also be called the Development Dictionary perspective, as echoed throughout the book of that name (Sachs ed. 1992). The perspective is shared by Escobar, and to a lesser extent Ferguson and in a different way Hobart. Like most myths it is based on poor or partial history, betraying a lack of knowledge of both colonialism and decolonization, and throughout it reflects a surprising ethnocentrism: it is very much the view from North America. Ill-informed about the history of government, it has a Jacobinist conviction of the state's power to achieve miraculous things: the title of Ferguson's book. The Anti- Politics Machine, is an eloquent expression of this. It is also grounded in the 'victim culture'. Rather as those engaged in anti- racist training sometimes argued that there are 'racists' and there are 'victims of racism' (Donald and Rattansi eds 1992; Gilroy 1993), the development myth proposes that there are 'developers' and 'victims of development' (see the unfortunate souls portrayed on the dust-cover of Crush's edited collection, 1995). Escobar adds 'resisters of development', but there is no other way. Thus the myth would, for example, have great difficulty in encompassing the wide range of responses and agendas found among Indian women working in and for development whose work is documented in this volume in the paper by Unnithan and Srivastava. Drinkwater (1992: 169) points to the 'danger of oversimplifying and setting up a dominant position as an easy target'. Although development is sometimes guided by authoritative, monocular visions, Unnithan and Srivastava's paper (this volume), along with Gardner's discussion of a major project in a country in South Asia, underline the point that development knowledge is not usually a single set of ideas and assumptions. Gardner observes correctly (this volume, p. 134) that while our understanding of 'indigenous knowledge' is growing increasingly sophisticated, that of developmental knowledge often remains frustratingly simplistic. This is generally presented as homogeneous and rooted in 'scientific rationalism' . . . [but there is a] need to understand how development knowledge is not one single set of ideas and assumptions. While . . . it may function hegemonically, it is also created and recreated by multiple agents, who often have very different understandings of their work. To think of the discourse of development is far too limiting. To that extent, Hobart is correct to refer to 'several co-existent discourses of development' (1993: 12). But there is as much diversity within the community of 'professional developers' (one of the parties identified by Hobart), as between them and other stakeholders or 'players' (in Hobart's account, local people' and 'national government'). Within development there is and has always been a multiplicity of voices, 'a multiplicity of "knowledges"' (Cohen 1993: 32), even if some are more powerful than others: as Pettier, this volume, points out, 'a simple recording of the plurality of voices' is never enough. Preston, who has written extensively on development, provides an interesting way into this subject. Discourses of Development: State, Market and Polity in the Analysis of Complex Change (1994) is an exercise in political theory written largely from outside anthropology which places the study of discourse less in the work of Foucault than in a wider hermeneutic-critical tradition. However, in broader agreement with Foucauldian perspectives than he might allow, Preston argues that development discourse is both 'institutionally extensive [and] comprises a stock of ideas that informs the praxis of many groups' (ibid.: 4). It is not, however, singular. He identifies three discourses of development, each located in the changing political economy of the second half of the twentieth century. Each 'find their vehicles in particular institutional locations, and of course are disposed to particular political projects' (ibid.: 222).
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No Alternative
Voting negative endorses the status quo Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Hague Institute of Social Studies, Third World Quarterly, v21, n2, 2000
If we strip away the exaggerated claims, the anti-positioning, what remains is an uneven landscape. Eventually the question must be asked: what about the politics of post-development? Fine points of theory aside, what is to be done? Post-development does make positive claims and is associated with affirmative counterpoints such as indigenous knowledge and cultural diversity. It opts for Gandhian frugality, not consumerism; for conviviality, a la Ivan Illich, for grassroots movements and local struggles. But none of these is specific to post-development nor do they necessarily add up to the conclusion of rejecting development. Forming a position in relation to post-development might proceed as follows. Let's not quibble about details but take your points on board and work with them. What do you have to offer? This varies considerably: Sachs (1992) is a reasonable refresher course in critiques of development. Latouche's arguments are often perceptive and useful, though they can also be found in alternative development sources (such as Rahman, 1993; Pradervand, 1989) and are mostly limited to sub-Saharan Africa. A common-sense reaction may be: your points are well taken, now what do we do? The response of Gilbert Rist is that alternatives are not his affair.(n6) The general trend in several sources is to stop at critique. What this means is an endorsement of the status quo and, in effect, more of the same. This is the core weakness of postdevelopment (cf. Cowen & Shenton, 1996).
The kritik is just whistling in the dark Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Hague Institute of Social Studies, Third World Quarterly, v21, n2, 2000
Post-development is caught in rhetorical gridlock. Using discourse analysis as an ideological platform invites political impasse and quietism. In the end post-development offers no politics besides the self-organising capacity of the poor, which actually lets the development responsibility of states and international institutions off the hook. Post-development arrives at development agnosticism by a different route but shares the abdication of development with neoliberalism. Since most insights in post-development sources are not specific to post-development (and are often confused with alternative development), what makes postdevelopment distinctive is the rejection of development. Yet the rejection of development does not arise from post-development insights as a necessary conclusion. In other words, one can share post-development's observations without arriving at this conclusion: put another way, there is no compelling logic to postdevelopment arguments. Commonly distinguished reactions to modernity are neo-traditionalism, modernisation and postmodernism (e.g. McEvilley, 1995). Post-development belongs to the era of the `post'-post-structuralism, postmodernism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism. It is premised on an awareness of endings, on `the end of modernity' and, in Vattimo's (1988) words, the `crisis of the future'. Postdevelopment parallels postmodernism both in its acute intuitions and in being directionless in the end, as a consequence of its refusal to, or lack of interest in, translating critique into construction. At the same time it also fits the profile of the neo-traditionalist reaction to modernity. There are romantic and nostalgic strands to post-development and its reverence for community, Gemeinschaft and the traditional, and there is an element of neo-Luddism in the attitude towards science and technology. The overall programme is one of resistance rather than transformation or emancipation. Post-development is based on a paradox. While it is clearly part of the broad critical stream in development, it shows no regard for the progressive potential and dialectics of modernity--for democratisation, soft-power technologies, reflexivity. Thus, it is not difficult to see that the three nodal discourses identified by Escobar--democratisation, difference and anti-development--themselves arise out of modernisation. Democratisation continues the democratic impetus of the Enlightenment; difference is a function of the transport and communication revolutions, the world becoming `smaller' and societies multicultural; and anti-development elaborates the dialectics of the Enlightenment set forth by the Frankfurt School. Generally, the rise of social movements and civil society activism, North and South, is also an expression of the richness of overall development, and cannot simply be captured under the label `anti'. Post-development's source of strength is a hermeneutics of suspicion, an anti-authoritarian sensibility, and hence a suspicion of alternative development as an `alternative managerialism'. But since it fails to translate this sensibility into a constructive position, what remains is whistling in the dark. What is the point of declaring development a `hoax' (Norberg-Hodge, 1995) without proposing an alternative?
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No Alternative
Their alternative is nonsense. Doing the same action with a different name means the system is as strong as ever Jonathan Crush, Professor of Geography at Queens University, The Power of Development, 1995, p. 18-19
Is there a way of writing (speaking or thinking) beyond the language of development? Can its hold on the imagination of both the powerful and the powerless be transcended? Can we get round, what Watts calls, the 'develop- ment gridlock'? Can, as Escobar puts it, the idea of 'catching up' with the West be drained of its appeal? Any contemporary volume of development- related essays can no longer afford to ignore these questions. One of the most damaging criticisms levelled against Said's (1978) notion of Orientalism is that it provides no basis for understanding how that discourse can be overcome. This book also, by definition, cannot stand outside the phenomenon being analysed. The text itself is made possible by the languages of development and, in a sense, it contributes to their perpetuation. To imagine that the Western scholar can gaze on development from above as a distanced and impartial observer, and formulate alternative ways of thinking and writing, is simply a conceit. To claim or adopt such a position is simply to replicate a basic rhetorical strategy of development itself. What we can do, as a first step, is to examine critically the rival claims of those who say that the language of development can, or is, being transcended. To assert, like Esteva (1987: 135), that 'development stinks' is all very well, but it is not that helpful if we have no idea about how the odour will be erased.
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Their evidence just says communities without money can be rich. We certainly dont deny that, but we think that when people are starving and dying, it is bad enough to justify being referred to as poverty Poverty is bad when framed in terms of consumption. We enable Rwanda to choose what and how much it will produce Md Anisur Rahman, Peoples Self-Development: Perspectives on Participatory Action Research, economist who headed the ILOs Programme on Participatory Organizations for the Rural Poor, 1993, p. 186
The notion of 'poverty' follows the same viewpoint. The concern here is whether a person has the necessary income or access or 'entitlement' to the bundle of goods and services postulated to be the needs of human beings as consumers. 'Poverty' in terms of lack of an 'entitlement' to develop as a creative being is, again, not expressed as a concern .The problem of 'poverty' in this sense is a consumer's rather than a creator's problem, focused on the 'poor' not being able to consume the things desired (or biologically needed) rather than not having the opportunity to produce (or command) them through their creative acts.
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A2: Escobar
Escobar is bad R.D. Grillo, School of African and Asian Studies, University of Sussex, 1997, Discourses of Development, p. 1415 If Hobart tackles the question of discourse (and discursive gaps: 'separate and incommensurable') from the point of view of philosophy, the second study, Escobar's Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995), treats discourse from an avowedly political stance. Although squarely concerned with discourse and development, the book is something of a disappointment when compared with his 1991 paper which anticipated it. It is rambling, often overheated in its language, and sometimes plain wrong in its interpretation of world historical events, for example, his discussion of post-war US policy towards the colonial powers (ibid.: 31), or his account of the development of ideas about economic and social planning (ibid.: 85). He betrays a lack of understanding of the nature of the environmentalist movement and of the concept of sustainable development (portrayed as 'the last attempt to articulate modernity and capitalism before the advent of cyberculture'; ibid.: 202), and considers that the 'Bruntland report' (sic) 'inaugurated a period of unprecedented gluttony in the history of vision and knowledge with the concomitant rise of a global "ecocracy"'. Generally, this is a badly written, curiously ethnocentric book. Nonetheless there is more than a grain of truth in much of what Escobar writes, and his views on development and discourse are important, not least because they are likely to be widely shared by anthropologists.
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A2: Latouche
Latouches answer to those who attempt to re-appropriate development is that calling a dictatorship a democracy doesnt change peoples desire for a real democracy. That just means development is bad if its a bad kind of development. Theres no warrant why the word itself is bad Latouche is a fool. Development is only toxic in the context of market economics Takis Fotopoulos, Editor, Democracy and Nature, THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Volume 5 Number 1, March 1999
http://www.geocities.com/democracy_nature/vol5/editorial_3.htm Serge Latouche argues a strong case against sustainable development and the entire economic literature (as well as the politicians rhetoric) built around this concept. He persuasively shows that sustainable development is a contradiction in termsin fact, a fraud. As the author stresses, by adding the adjective sustainable to the development term, one does not mean to bring up for discussion again the term development but only to superficially add an ecological component to it. However, to Latouches conclusion that it is not possible to show that development can be different from how it was in the past one has to add the important proviso, within the market economy framework. In other words, it is not development as such which is wrong but the specific type of development implied by the logic and the dynamics of the market economya fact which means that within a different institutional framework, which secures the equal distribution of economic power between and within the peoples of the world, it is perfectly possible to show that development can be different from how it was in the past.
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A2: Rahnema
Rahnema is too simplistic Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Hague Institute of Social Studies, Third World Quarterly, v21, n2, 2000
Ray Kiely adds another note: 'When Rahnema (1997: 391) argues that the end of development "represents a call to the `good people' everywhere to think and work together", we are left with the vacuous politics of USA for Africa's "We are the World". Instead of a politics which critically engages with material inequalities, we have a post-development era where "people should be nicer to each other" `. (1999: 24)
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