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Reencountering Development: Livelihood

Transitions and Place Transformations in the
Andes

Anthony Bebbington

To cite this article: Anthony Bebbington (2000) Reencountering Development: Livelihood

Transitions and Place Transformations in the Andes, Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, 90:3, 495-520, DOI: 10.1111/0004-5608.00206

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 Reencountering Development:
Livelihood Transitions and Place
Transformations in the Andes
Anthony Bebbington

Department of Geography, University of Colorado at Boulder

Neither poststructural nor neoliberal interpretations of development capture the full extent and
complexity of rural transformations in the Andes. Poststructural critiques tend to view develop-
ment as a process of cultural destruction and homogenization, while neoliberal interpretations
identify a different development “failure” that inheres in “inefficient” patterns of resource use,
and the “nonviability” of large parts of the Andean peasantry. In each case, the state is seen as a
problem: as an agent of dominating modernization, or as a brake on market-led transformation.
The paper reviews these positions in the light of the transformations in governance, livelihoods,
and landscape that have occurred in the regions of Colta, Guamote, and Otavalo, all centers of
indigenous Quichua populations in the Ecuadorian Andes. These transformations question the
accuracy of arguments about cultural destruction or nonviability. Instead they suggest that people
have built economically viable livelihood strategies that, while neither agricultural nor necessar-
ily rural, allow people to sustain a link with rural places, and in turn allow the continued repro-
duction of these places as distinctively Quichua. The cases also point to the increased indigenous
control of political, civil, and economic institutions and the important roles that development
interventions, including those of the state, have played in fostering this control. In sum, this sug-
gests the need for more nuanced interpretations of development that emphasize human agency
and the room to maneuver that can exist within otherwise constraining institutions and struc-
tures. It also suggests the value of placing livelihood and the coproduction of place at the center
of any interpretation of the processes and effects of rural development. Key Words: critical devel-
opment geography, livelihood, place, Andes, social movements.

W hether seen as “pioneering,” “biting,”

or “an opportunity lost,” (respectively,
Peet and Watts 1996b: 17; Cooper
and Packard 1997: 15; Lehmann 1997: 568) Ar-
turo Escobar’s work (1984, 1988, 1991, 1995)
has stirred the worlds of critical geography and
development studies.1 Emblematic of a broader
poststructural critique of development, Escobar’s
analysis falls within a long and distinguished tra-
dition that sees little possibility of improvements
in human well-being without radical political
economic change. His work questions the possi-
bility of building or even imagining alternatives
from within the current languages and institu-
tions of development.2 Indeed, it suggests that
these very institutions and languages are deeply
implicated in processes of cultural destruction.
Poststructural critiques are not alone in pos-
ing profound and critical questions about rural
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90(3), 2000, p. 495–520
© 2000 by Association of American Geographers
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.
development and its official institutions. Neolib-
eral interpretations similarly see little cumula-
tive benefit from state intervention in rural
areas. In much of Latin America, such approaches
increasingly argue that large parts of the peas-
antry (or campesinado) are no longer “viable” in
the face of a globalizing market economy. Thus,
while, in the poststructuralist critique, the state
and development are viewed as the aggressive
agents of modernization, according to neoliberal
critiques, they have largely stood in the way of
the transformative and modernizing potential
of the market. This leads to recommendations
for further liberalization of market-based resource
allocation from the constraints placed on it by
state and customary institutions. That such lib-
eralization would fuel a redistribution of rural
resources (especially land and water) to more
competitive and larger economic agents, and a
496 Bebbington
concomitant movement of campesinos out of
agriculture and rural areas, is deemed desirable
on efficiency grounds.
While empirically and normatively dubious,
such interpretations command far more politi-
cal influence than do poststructural ones. This
makes it that much more important to build a
counternarrative that meets them on their own
turf while questioning many of their supposi-
tions on conceptual and empirical grounds. Yet
in this sense, poststructural positions are trou-
blesome. By finding so little that is recoverable
within the practice of development, by failing to
address in any detail the economic dimensions
of alternatives, and above all, by not exploring
the diversity of development processes and out-
comes, they fail to develop the empirical bases of
a possible counternarrative. Furthermore, when
subjected to empirical interrogation, the categor-
ical assertions of such positions appear overstated,
in turn suggesting theoretical weaknesses. As a
result, and however unintentionally, they cede
ground to neoliberal interpretations and the
types of programs that might derive from them.
That poststructural critiques give little atten-
tion to alternatives and leave so little space for a
continuing dialogue with the development ex-
perience to date is largely a consequence of their
emphasis on discursive critique.3 Interpretations
of development, and its alternatives, might dif-
fer if they were based on ethnographic and his-
torical analyses of the ways in which develop-
ment interventions and market transactions
become part of a longer, sedimented history of a
place and its linkages with the wider world
(Moore 1999; Massey 1994). Indeed, if we look
at histories of places, rather than of discourses,
and trace actual processes of livelihood and
landscape transformation and the institutional
interventions that have accompanied them, it
becomes easier to identify elements of feasible
development alternatives. Germs of these alter-
natives have already been elaborated at the
intersection of popular practices and external
interventions, albeit in quite unanticipated
ways. In this sense, I will use discussions of re-
gional transformations in highland Ecuador to
point to problems (as well as strengths) in the
normative positions and analytical tools of both
neoliberal and poststructural interpretations.
These observations will provide a basis for build-
ing theory that draws on insights of each type of
interpretation, and that helps identify ways for-
ward for a far more geographical theory of devel-
opment revolving around notions of place and
livelihood. Indeed, the implication is that a more
comprehensive development theory has to be
built at the interface of geography and history.
To make these claims, the first section of the
paper lays out elements of recent poststructural
and neoliberal interpretations of rural develop-
ment in the Andean region, subjecting them to
critical scrutiny on conceptual grounds.4 The
second section then subjects these interpreta-
tions to empirical scrutiny through a compara-
tive analysis of regional transformations in three
localities in highland Ecuador: Colta, Guamote,
and Otavalo. It quickly becomes apparent that
it is impossible to judge the development expe-
rience of these places through the blunt inter-
pretations of either type of critique. These are
places where outmigration and land-degradation
have been accompanied by increased indige-
nous control of everything from municipal gov-
ernment, to regional textile markets, to bus
companies. They are places where increased con-
sumption of modern commodities has come to-
gether with the emergence of assertive and ever
more ethnically self-conscious social organiza-
tions. More generally, as the economic geogra-
phy of these regions has changed, so new and
changing cultural practices have also been played
out, creating landscapes that continue to be dis-
tinctive, and indeed alternative to modern cap-
italist landscapes even as they incorporate many
ideas, practices, and technologies of modernity.
The third section teases out certain patterns
across these cases. Overall, profound transfor-
mations in the social relations that structure ac-
cess to resources and power have accompanied
and contributed to the development of these
places. So also has a progressive expansion of
grassroots influence and control over the pro-
cesses through which these places are produced
and governed. These changes appear to be as
much a result of the external interventions of
state programs, NGOs, and churches as they are
an effect of popular initiative. The transforma-
tions and interventions involved are, then, too
complex and contingent to be judged simply as
normatively desirable or not, as “success” or
“failure,” as “development” or “destruction.” They
also question the accuracy of frameworks that
work with relatively unitary and unproblema-
tized notions of state, market, and community.
The final section of the paper draws out im-
plications for theory. It suggests that cases such
as those discussed here lay the bases for encoun-
 Reencountering Development
tering a notion of development that is at once
alternative and developmentalist, critical and
practicable. Indeed, this is the larger goal. Criti-
cal development research has so often been vul-
nerable to the charge of impracticability be-
cause its normative concerns and profound
critique of mainstream notions of development
have blunted empirical inquiry into whether the
practice of development indeed had the effects
that this critique anticipated, and whether pop-
ular practices indeed carried the germs of the
same utopias as those implied by this theory. Too
often this led to theory without actors (and
therefore without entry points into practice),
and alternatives that required forms of structural
change that, in the short-to-medium terms,
seemed improbable at best (Booth 1994). If re-
search engaged with questions of practice—
both popular and bureaucratic—it might be-
come apparent that the goals, meaning, and
power relationships underlying development of-
ten differ from those imputed by much develop-
ment theory. Power, meaning, and institutions
are constantly being negotiated, and these nego-
tiations open up spaces for potentially profound
social and institutional change. Understanding
how these spaces open and how they are used is
a critical research challenge, and will take us be-
yond some of the oppositions that haunt much
development theory.
Critiques of Development
in the Andes
The analytical tools and normative concerns
of poststructural and neoliberal critiques of de-
velopment (critiques that Cooper and Packard
[1997: 2–3] term, respectively, “postmodernist”
and “ultramodernist”) differ profoundly. At one
level, these differences are part of a far long-
standing split in development studies between
critical Marxian and sociocultural interpreta-
tions, and more developmentalist approaches
informed by neoclassical economics and ratio-
nal choice theory. Neoliberal approaches aim to
understand the means through which resources
can be most efficiently allocated to maximize
their economic productivity. In their purest
sense, they therefore criticize interventions that
support rural producers on criteria other than
competitiveness as diversions from the norma-
tive goal of efficiency maximization. In this view,
people are producers and consumers of value—a
497
value assessed in monetary terms. Poststructural
critiques begin from a profoundly different no-
tion of value, and of valid knowledge. Valuing
difference, they are critical of modernizing no-
tions of development, perhaps especially neolib-
eralism, on the grounds that they break down
difference, impose cultural homogenization, and
constitute a form of domination: “the project of
neoliberal globalization represents the most re-
cent of such discourses, and contains within it
the attempted subordination of different modes
of thought and interpretation” (Slater 1997: 274).
Yet ironically these critiques converge to a
considerable degree around other claims: each
declares that orthodox development has failed
and that official development bureaucracies are
deeply implicated in this failure; each relies
largely on externally defined criteria to judge
this failure; and each has suggested radical (as
opposed to reformist) alternatives that involve a
decentering of the state.5 These alternatives de-
rive in considerable measure from their respec-
tive theoretical frameworks, as well as their pri-
mary concerns about the failure of mainstream
development practice. The poststructural critique,
primarily concerned with the ways in which de-
velopment constitutes a form of cultural domi-
nation and homogenization, seeks alternatives
in the cultural and political practices of popular
actors. The neoliberal critique, primarily con-
cerned with the failure of development pro-
grams to foster rural growth and income genera-
tion, seeks alternatives in the efficient allocation
of resources that would derive from the liberal-
ization of markets.
Cowen and Shenton (1996) suggest a yet deeper
sense in which the two frameworks converge.
They argue that both approaches (indeed all de-
velopment doctrine) ultimately imply a notion
of “trusteeship,” in which one actor, on the basis
of their presumed privileged understanding or
institutional authority, determines on behalf of
others the direction in which development
should proceed. In apportioning trusteeship to
agents who are ultimately not the citizenry, such
frameworks, they suggest, frustrate the possibil-
ity of autonomous human improvement.6
Development as Knowledge-Power Regime:
Poststructural Critiques
While not alone in pursuing a critique of de-
velopment informed by Foucault in particular,
498 Bebbington
and post structural theory more generally, Esco-
bar’s has been the most sustained critical project
(Escobar 1984, 1988, 1991, 1995; Watts and
McCarthy 1997: 73). In essence, he claims that
development represents a further elaboration of
the Enlightenment project, in the process im-
posing Northern interests on those of the South
(Escobar 1995: 55–101; Apffel-Marglin 1998: 29;
cf. Frank 1969).7 Thus, the idea of development
allows for the notion that there are people and
places that are underdeveloped, “backward” and
poor, and therefore in need of development.
This labeling turns them into the targets of de-
velopment programs that then intervene in or-
der to promote a particular ethnocentric notion
of what it is to be developed. These interven-
tions aim to turn rural people into efficient pro-
ducers, and if they do not make this transition,
then they ought be encouraged to leave the
countryside: “produce or perish,” Escobar puts it
(1995: 157). As these instruments are not based
on an understanding of the actual concerns, as-
pirations, and strategies of the popular sectors,
they inevitably fail, but this merely—he
suggests—justifies a further round of interven-
tion to get it better. That there is bureaucratic
complicity in development failure is argued yet
more forcefully in Ferguson’s (1990) study of ru-
ral development in Lesotho. Ferguson suggests
that development failure serves the interests of
the very institutions charged with implement-
ing development, because their own reproduc-
tion depends on a continued official commit-
ment to development at the same time as an
official belief that it has not yet been achieved.8
Ferguson’s state, like Escobar’s, seems mono-
lithic, unable and unwilling to act in a way that
does anything but depoliticize development
and reproduce development failure (cf. Moore
1999).
These critiques are not dissimilar from the
dependency writing of the 1970s (Lehmann
1997; Watts and McCarthy 1997: 75), though
their form of analysis and implications for strat-
egy are different. Dependency writing empha-
sized the need for change in the wider political
economy (de Janvry 1981). Poststructural cri-
tiques of development instead emphasize change
at a more decentralized, local scale:9 “[T]here
are no grand alternatives that can be applied
to all places or all situations,” and so “one must
resist the desire to formulate alternatives at an
abstract, macro level; one must also resist the
idea that the articulation of alternatives will
take place in intellectual and academic circles”
(Escobar 1995: 222). Instead, this articulation
will occur in the alternative grassroots practices
that resist development, and more generally in
the practices of popular groups10 whose “organiz-
ing strategies . . . begin to revolve more and
more around two principles: the defense of cul-
tural difference . . . and the valorization of eco-
nomic needs and opportunities in terms that are
not strictly those of profit and the market” (Es-
cobar 1995: 226). For Escobar, the defining fea-
tures of the alternatives being pursued among
these groups reside in the “defense of the local,”
“identity strengthening,” “opposition to mod-
ernizing development,” and the elaboration of
proposals from the context of existing con-
straints (1995: 226). That these are indeed the
defining features of these popular practices, and
that they hold out any realistic hope for feasible
alternatives is, however, less substantiated.11
In framing a view of alternatives in this way,
Escobar is drawing—as does much work in critical
anthropologies and geographies of development—
on notions of the resistant peasant (cf. Scott
1985).12 Such conceptualizations, however, have
their own difficulties—in particular, the ten-
dency to essentialize about peasant motivation,
and to invoke voluntaristic interpretations of
cultural politics. But, as Smith (1989) has sug-
gested, forms of peasant cultural politics are
rooted deeply in the material conditions of peas-
ant existence—in the ways in which they make
a living. Making a living, making living mean-
ingful, and struggling for the rights and possibil-
ity of doing both are all related. Yet the litera-
ture on resistance and alternatives tends to
detach interpretations of politics of identity and
place from these livelihood practices. If they
were reembedded, and if frameworks made clearer
how very situated are such practices and poli-
tics, then we might anticipate forms of political
behavior and responses to development that are
neither necessarily resistant nor antipathetic to
the logics of markets and modernity. Locality
might also be conceptualized differently—not
as pregiven but rather as continuously pro-
duced at the intersection of livelihood practices
(understood as making a living and making it
meaningful), local politics, institutional inter-
ventions, and the wider political economy. Un-
derstood thus, place would be less something
that people defended, and more something
whose means and practices of production they
aimed to control.
 Reencountering Development
Such a conceptualization means foreground-
ing problems of livelihood and production as
much as problems of politics and power—and
emphasizing negotiation and accommodation as
much as resistance. More generally, it suggests
the importance of paying more attention to
agency. “Poor” people may be discursively con-
structed as objects of development (or even as
subaltern subjects of resistance),13 but they also
act individually and collectively, creating their
own room for maneuver within and beyond any
constraints these categories may place on them.
As Escobar suggests, the seeds of alternatives are
most likely to be found in those actions. But
those same actions, rather than presumed ana-
lytical categories, will define the contours of
those alternatives and the particular ways in
which they negotiate relationships with state,
market, and civil society.
Viable Andes? Neoliberalism and
Andean Futures
While the poststructural critique has as-
sumed progressively greater force in academic
debate, a quite distinct critical conversation has
also emerged in Latin America: the discourse on
“viability.” Though the steady differentiation of
a peasantry into a capitalized sector on the one
hand, and a landless or land-poor proletariat on
the other, has absorbed many pages of debate
(de Janvry 1981; Lehmann 1986; Llambi 1989;
Kay 1995), the significance of this discussion
has increased in recent years. Driven by the rise
of neoliberal agendas, some have argued with
increasing explicitness that there is little virtue
in an uncompetitive and inefficient campesino
sector.14 They therefore argue that rural devel-
opment programs should focus only on viable
campesinos, helping them to restructure their
productive strategy so as to become competitive
in an open market. Those who are not deemed
viable ought be assisted in making the transition
to other livelihoods, most likely in urban areas
(López 1995; Hojman 1998). Though voiced most
explicitly in Chile, where some estimate that up
to half of the peasantry is not viable (see Kay 1997;
Sotomayor 1994), these discussions are equally
apparent elsewhere. An InterAmerican Devel-
opment Bank (IDB) report, for instance, sug-
gests that significant parts of the Bolivian alti-
plano [high plane] are nonviable and that programs
there should foster outmigration (IDB 1996).
499
Such interpretations have serious flaws. They
read the viability of rural places only in terms of
economic competitiveness, and likewise under-
stand poverty only in income terms. As good
“trustees” of development (cf. Cowen and Shen-
ton 1996), their authors presume to prescribe for
others—prescriptions that will clearly foster the
destruction of rural practices in the name of fis-
cal efficiency. Yet at the same time, these inter-
pretations do point to empirically substantiated
problems related to the economic dimensions of
livelihoods (Mayer and Glave 1999). Studying
programs of three well-respected nongovern-
mental organizations (NGOs) in the Peruvian
and Bolivian highlands, van Niekerk (1994) con-
cludes that the impact of their interventions on
incomes was less than the cost of implementing
the programs. Worse still, a recent study of thir-
teen municipalities in four departments of the
Bolivian highlands suggests that 79 percent of
the population perceives a decline in crop and
livestock productivity, with even higher rates
among poorer farmers; only a handful of com-
munities perceived any impact from livestock or
crop projects (VMPPFM 1998; cf. Zoomers
1998). Similar, if less drastic, patterns also
emerge from recent surveys in Ecuador, which
suggest declining agricultural income, an in-
creased reproduction squeeze on the campesi-
nado, and an increase in temporary migration,
with between twenty and fifty-five percent of
males migrating (Hentschel et al. 1996; Lan-
jouw 1996). Within the current policy context,
many farms in higher, drier, more remote loca-
tions seem no longer able to sustain families in
situ. Some observers end up succumbing to the
despair of environmental determinism: “When
all is said and done, one can’t change environ-
mental limitations” (an official quoted in van
Niekerk 1997: 3; see also Hentschel et al. 1996).
For all the limits of neoliberal arguments
about viability in the Andes, the empirical work
that underlies them is therefore a reminder of
real problems of production and income. It high-
lights the extent to which a focus on discourse
misses a large part of the drama of livelihood
struggles, practices, and dilemmas in the Andes
and therefore—like neoliberal frameworks—
presents a partial view of rural life. Furthermore,
they remind us that a failure to address the
ways in which more viable livelihoods are and
might be constructed only favors the ascen-
dancy and hegemony of neoliberal frameworks
that would ultimately endorse policies that would
500 Bebbington
have the effect of fostering the demise of the
campesino sector.
Ways Forward? Hybrid Livelihoods and
Comparative Ethnographies
Neoliberal and poststructural positions are,
in one sense, like oil and water: their political
agendas, normative intents, and epistemological
positions are quite different. Partly as a conse-
quence, they emphasize different dimensions of
rural livelihoods. Neoliberal takes on rural de-
velopment in the Andes draw our attention to
the very real challenges that Andean people
confront in making a living and negotiating
their relationships with a range of product, la-
bor, and other markets. Meanwhile, poststruc-
tural positions focus our attention on the ways
in which rural people make living meaningful
and struggle politically for spaces of autonomy
and self-realization—themes on which the via-
bility discussion, and much other development
research, are largely silent.
Yet while their normative intents make these
approaches fundamentally incompatible, their
substantive concerns surely represent different
parts of a larger whole in which rural people are
engaged all the time: the challenge of securing a
viable way of guaranteeing the material basis of
their livelihood and, at the same time, building
something of their own. If, in practice, people
pursue these concerns at the same time, then
analytical approaches that pay attention prima-
rily to one or other dimension of them are likely
to work with oversimplified notions of grassroots
economic and political action, and of grassroots
notions of “development” and betterment. In-
deed, I argue that if our approaches give equal
weight to these different dimensions of liveli-
hood, then this can challenge notions both of
viability and of development. On the one hand,
it shifts the notion of viability from one focusing
only on viable economic activities, to one con-
cerned with livelihood and place, and the ways
in which people struggle to keep rural localities
alive by somehow generating incomes that will
allow the material reproduction of these places.
On the other hand, it will challenge notions of
development as destruction and of markets as
anathema, for one of the critical means through
which people make livelihoods and places via-
ble is engaging with the institutions of develop-
ment, the wider modernizing processes of which
they are a part, and a range of product and labor
markets. Finally, it is likely to challenge our no-
tions of resistance and politics at least as these
relate to development, for as Keith (1997: 276)
notes, “a politics of the possible must inevitably
emerge from a sustained engagement with the
empirical, not a naïve romance of the real.”
Escobar provides us with something of a lens
for thinking about these issues with the notion
of “hybrid cultures” (1995: 217–26). Popular
practices—which, he suggests, should be the basis
of any alternative development—constantly
piece together the old and new, elements of mo-
dernity with longer-standing elements of local
practice. They are, in his words, characterized
by a relentless “traffic between the traditional
and the modern” (1995: 222). The difficulty
with the notion of hybrid, however, is that it as-
sumes that there exist “prehybrid” cultures. Yet
Latin American landscapes and livelihoods
have been hybridized at least since the sixteenth
century (Whitmore and Turner 1992). It is per-
haps this implicit assumption of “prehybridity”
that underlies a certain tendency to invoke ideal
typical notions of popular practice as the basis of
development alternatives. Yet, if all practices
and cultures are indeed hybridized, then it seems
unreasonable to make categorical statements
about the principles that will characterize popu-
lar practices and development alternatives—for
they, along with identity and place, will be dy-
namic, unstable, and above all situated.
A second point of departure begins from
poststructural concerns to highlight differences
and identities, radicalizing the point more than
do their discussions of alternatives. For just as
people might assert difference and identity vis-
à-vis development and its institutions, these dif-
ferences are also at stake in relationships within
the popular sectors. Imagining alternatives, as
well as practicing current livelihoods, is there-
fore likely to be internally debated and conflic-
tive, among genders, generations, kin groups,
communities, and others. This is not to mini-
mize the importance of these alternatives, but it
is to push a step further in not romanticizing
them, and therefore in making them seem more
credible.
The third and central point of departure also
derives from Escobar: his call for more ethnogra-
phies of development and of how it is experi-
enced and resisted. Again, though, if local cul-
tures are hybrid, to emphasize questions of
resistance to development is perhaps once again
 Reencountering Development
to apply too partial a lens to popular practices. If
one of the principle challenges in the contem-
porary Andes is to address problems of produc-
tion and income, it may be appropriate to call
for ethnographies of how people have struggled
to compose livelihoods aimed at making a liv-
ing, and making it meaningful. It is in building
these livelihoods that people encounter devel-
opment interventions, state and market, in ways
that might be interpreted sometimes as resis-
tance, sometimes as accommodation, and some-
times as instrumental. If in such ethnographies,
we find—as I believe we do—that livelihoods
have not only been viable, but have also allowed
accumulation, albeit in very unanticipated ways,
then the neoliberal discourse on viability needs
reframing. And if we find—as I believe we do—
that this has been possible to a considerable
degree because of development programs, state
interventions, and market integration, again in
often very unanticipated ways, then the post-
structural critique also needs reframing, norma-
tively and analytically.
In this sense, empirical, ethnographic and
historical analysis of particular regional con-
texts might also generate the type of knowledge
and theory that could resolve the problem of
trusteeship as laid out by Cowen and Shenton
(1996). By illuminating the concerns and no-
tions of improvement implicit in popular strate-
gies, and by understanding the types of develop-
ment of which these actors aim to be “trustees,”
empirical work offers the prospect of illuminat-
ing the idea of development as lived, rather than
invoked, thus rescuing the idea of development
from the doctrinal lenses of those who would
otherwise define it. This might also change the
criteria used for thinking about the impacts of
development.
Transitions and Transformations
in the Ecuadorian Andes
The risk of calling for such ethnographies
and histories of development is that it succumbs
to the problem of exceptionalism, making diffi-
cult any effort to build theory on the basis of in-
dividual cases. One possible response is to do
comparative analysis of ethnographic and his-
torical material.15 Though this has its own
methodological difficulties (see below), it is the
approach taken here. I discuss the transforma-
tion of three localities in the Ecuadorian Andes
501
(Figure 1) during the second half of this century.
The cases deliberately juxtapose two localities
(Colta and Guamote, both in the province of
Chimborazo) which, for many observers, have
been examples of development failure and areas
where campesino livelihoods are in crisis, with a
third case (Otavalo), which is often viewed as
one of the most successful instances of local de-
velopment in the Andes. The reason for juxta-
posing the cases is to suggest that there are also
intriguing similarities among them. In each case,
access to resources has become more inclusive,
and new and more accountable local gover-
nance structures have been created. Likewise,
livelihoods have been built that, by engaging
with a range of markets, have allowed levels of
accumulation that in part sustain the material
basis for these other sociopolitical and cultural
changes. In each case, external interventions
have played (often unanticipated) roles in fos-
tering these processes of transformation. To-
gether, these patterns make it difficult to talk
glibly either of nonviability or of development
as destruction.16 The cases do, though, suggest
the importance of further elaborating some of
these claims. First, though, a comment on ques-
tions of method.
Reflections on Methodology
To attempt a comparative reading of the ar-
ticulations between development interventions
and microregional political economy opens up a
series of methodological questions. Such ethno-
graphically informed comparisons across differ-
ent sites “may entail a novel kind of fieldwork.
Rather than being situated in one, or perhaps
two, communities for the entire period of re-
search, the fieldworker must be mobile, covering
a network of sites that encompasses a process,
which is in fact the object of study” (Marcus and
Fischer 1986: 94). This raises several interpreta-
tive issues, for while the analysis of the process
itself might remain “thick,” discussions of the
particular place-based manifestations of that
process are necessarily thinner. Such a research
approach also raises logistical issues. Multilocale
work necessarily involves extended field pres-
ence, which is only possible at certain stages of a
career. In my own case, the most in-depth basis
for this comparative analysis was laid in 1988–
1989, during a fourteen-month study of the pro-
cesses of agrarian change and development in-
502 Bebbington
Figure 1. Ecuador and case study locations.
tervention in Colta and Guamote. That research
involved intensive involvement in four commu-
nities, and sustained contact with leaders and
staff of five federations of indigenous communi-
ties and with staff of six separate state and non-
governmental development organizations. This
work combined participant observation, ex-
tended and repeated discussions and interviews,
a short household survey in two of the commu-
nities, and some soil analysis and crop trials.
This was combined with far less intensive inter-
actions with people in twelve other communities.
I have since complemented that initial study
with five other field visits to the region over the
past decade. Though each subsequent study has
had different purposes, they have been part of a
larger deliberate attempt to understand the cu-
mulative effects of development intervention
on rural livelihoods and institutional change
over an extended period. Two studies were of
campesino organizations in Guamote and Colta,
and their relationships to NGOs; one looked at
the role of NGOs in local development; another
focused on the impacts of peasant organizations
on local governance in Guamote; and the fifth
was simply a return to some of the same commu-
nities where the earliest work was conducted, to
discuss patterns of change. This subsequent re-
search, conducted for far shorter periods of vari-
able duration, has involved in-depth interviews
(rather than ethnographic work) with some of
the same households, federations, NGOs, and
key informants as were encountered in the ear-
lier work. The advantage of such a sustained in-
volvement is that it brings to light processes of
change that can be missed in single-stay periods
of research. It has also allowed me to discuss my
own evolving interpretations with a variety of
the actors involved. The disadvantage is that
the nature and quality of information and in-
sights varies among the different periods of field
research.
These methodological problems of compara-
tive analysis are made much more serious by an
attempt to compare across different authors’
ethnographic and ethnohistorical research. Eth-
 Reencountering Development
nographies emphasize place, context, case spec-
ificity, and authorial insights. To seek more ge-
neric principles across ethnographic accounts
can do violence to the authors’ own intents.
Furthermore, given that different ethnographies
emphasize different dimensions of local social
and cultural practice, they do not all give com-
parable attention to the same issues. Any at-
tempt to draw comparisons might then stretch
the data beyond its justifiable reach. Indeed,
some would eschew the possibility of such com-
parison unless they were able to witness or par-
ticipate in the same empirical moments, and not
have to depend on the interpretations of the
ethnographer (Schegloff 1999). While there
can be no easy answer to this problem, to reject
entirely the possibility of reading across ethno-
graphic and historical accounts greatly dimin-
ishes the potential role of such approaches in
building up more nuanced and problematized
understandings of rural change. More generally,
it probably undermines the potential for the
sorts of ethnographically informed accounts of
regional processes called for by commentators
such as Marcus and Fischer (1986).
What follows is therefore my own compara-
tive reading of these different accounts. It is
based on the conviction that much of what is
narrated in these other accounts, when read
through the lens of my own experience, seems
quite plausible to me, while, at the same time,
providing additional insights that — though
beyond my own field experience — I am pre-
pared to accept as valid, given the conver-
gences of other authors’ insights with my own
interpretations. While this is perhaps an insuf-
ficiently rigorous set of criteria for reading
across different bodies of work, it is akin to the
criteria that researchers use when, as lay folk,
we engage in simple conversation aimed at ex-
tending the boundaries of our own knowledge
and understanding.
Colta: Migration and the Viability of Place
The canton of Colta is located in the central
highlands of Ecuador, with a population of
slightly less than 50,000 people,17 living mostly
in rural communities at altitudes of 3000 m and
above, along with a handful of small “urban”
centers of some two thousand people or so. Pri-
marily agricultural, Colta is also notable for the
high levels of periodic outmigration among its
503
residents. Such outmigration from rural areas is
often taken as an indicator that local liveli-
hoods are not viable. This phenomenon has
been interpreted as semiproletarianization, the
ever incomplete absorption of poor rural people
into the urban economy, as well as a necessary
survival strategy in conditions of natural-
resource scarcity (de Janvry 1981). Other authors
see periodic migration as a deliberate attempt to
continue to be a campesino (Farrell et al. 1989),
and to retain some form of economic activity
that offers a buffer against downturns in urban
labor markets (cf. Brown et al. 1997). Without
denying the sense in which migration is, in con-
siderable measure, a consequence of structural
constraints and regional underdevelopment,
these latter accounts also emphasize that mi-
grants are also agents, and in which migration is
a strategy as well as a necessity. For many families
in Colta, it has been a strategy for maintaining a
foothold in the region.18 This foothold, in turn,
allows the maintenance of agricultural prac-
tices, religious practices, and local institutions
through which the extent of Quichua (i.e., in-
digenous) control of Colta has expanded, and
through which its material landscape has been
transformed—in both its agricultural and built
forms. Though transformed, Colta thus contin-
ues to be the locus of a range of practices and
identifications with place and history which,
though constantly in flux and varying across
gender, generation, and other lines (cf. Silvey
and Lawson 1999), together constitute an im-
portant basis of being a Quichua from Colta.
These transformations are all the more re-
markable given that as recently as 1965, a Cor-
nell research team produced a study on the Qui-
chua population of Colta entitled “Indians in
Misery” (Maynard 1965). The study depicted
Quichuas dominated by large rural estates (haci-
endas) through various forms of tied labor rela-
tionship that restricted access to land. The ties
between hacienda, church, and local political
authorities likewise restricted possibilities of in-
digenous accumulation or any form of political
participation, preserving forms of social control
and exclusion in much the same way as Casa-
grande and Piper (1969) described for the
neighboring parish of San Juan. Yet at the same
time as the Cornell team was working, a series of
changes were occurring that would drive the
transformation of this region. The most impor-
tant of these was land reform. National land-
reform laws were passed in 1964 and, more far
504 Bebbington
reaching, in 1973. These laws marked the end of
the hacienda-based mode of production and so-
cial control, and had profound effects on Colta’s
agrarian and sociopolitical structure. Some sub-
division of estates had begun before land reform,
as early migrants used savings to purchase land,
and some hacienda owners began to sell, espe-
cially those who had a particularly unruly labor
force (cf. Thurner 1993). The laws, however, led
to an intense acceleration of this process of land
acquisition. By 1990, more than forty-three per-
cent of Colta’s land surface had been affected by
the land-reform process, and no large hacienda
remained, though some smaller ones still did
(Bebbington et al. 1992: 125).
These changes in access to land, while they
ended the former system of rural governance,
were not equal across Colta. Families and com-
munities19 gained access to different qualities and
amounts of land as a result of the combined ef-
fects of different geographies of population pres-
sure, of social conflict, of the onset of hacienda
decline, and of soil and water quality and avail-
ability. In cases such as the sector of Gatazo,
where families gained access to valley-bottom
alluvial land with irrigation water, and signifi-
cantly, where hacienda subdivision and migra-
tion had started at an earlier date, processes of
accumulation began earlier and have been rela-
tively rapid. Migration-based accumulation in
Gatazo was translated into land purchase, which
has in turn allowed accumulation strategies based
on intensive horticulture. Though again the ex-
tent to which this is so varies among households,
it has led to a reversal of outmigration as people
have moved back to the locale, sustaining them-
selves either entirely through agriculture, or
through a mix of agriculture and periodic partic-
ipation in local labor markets (Allen 1993).
In other cases, far more typical in Colta, the
land accessed was unirrigated and sloping and
has not allowed any significant agricultural in-
tensification. Indeed, reports from communities
in Colta with this type of land all emphasize
agricultural stagnation and land degradation
rather than intensification, and draw attention
to the importance of periodic (and occasionally
permanent) outmigration as a livelihood strat-
egy (Bebbington 1990; Knapp 1991; Muratorio
1982; Tolen 1995). Finally, in some more sui ge-
neris cases such as the communities of Santiago,
where land is poor and scarce, but where migra-
tion began quite early, significant numbers have
become itinerant traders (Gellner 1982) and
semiprofessionals (teachers, agricultural techni-
cians, etc.).
The livelihoods of contemporary Colta are
therefore now diverse: none linked to the haci-
enda, all deeply linked to the market, and most
still linked to rural property, however small the
plot or house. This shift in the nature and geog-
raphy of livelihoods in Colta has been accompa-
nied by important changes in the landscape.
Colta’s countryside is a mixture of small, often
visibly eroding fields dotted with breeze-block
houses, of one, two, or sometimes three and four
stories. Like Colta resident Manuel Alvarado’s
two-story house (in the community of Lupaxi
Grande), most of these have been built with
money earned elsewhere, in his case, first, while
working in the sugar cane harvests on the coast,
and subsequently, as a peddler of shoes and
clothing. Also, as in his case, responsibilities for
the house and the fields are feminized. While
Manuel is as happy in Colta as on the coast—
“when I’m on the coast, I’m a costeño; when I’m
in the community, I feel content, and this is my
land”—he makes his money on the coast and
sends it back to Colta for investment in housing.
Like many others, that is where he will ulti-
mately retire.
Accumulation and housing investment have
also been part of a subtle but important shift in
the centers of governance in Colta. New centers
have emerged at two scales. At a local level, the
hacienda has ceded to the community the cen-
ter of everyday political decisionmaking and
surveillance.20 These legal (and territorial) com-
munities now govern most of rural Colta, most
having been created since land reform. Though
only localized centers of power, most communi-
ties in this area (and Guamote—see below) mon-
itor carefully the passage of other people and ve-
hicles through the space they govern, be these
private individuals or government workers. In-
evitably, as I was entering a community where I
was working less intensively, I would be greeted
with a “Adonde vas gringuito” [where are you off
to, gringuito], and would be sought out by one or
another village dignitary shortly after arriving,
just checking up on me. Similarly, as the field
workers of the farmers’ association with whom I
spent much time in Colta would drive into a
community in which they had some task or
other to see to, people would come and check
on the purpose of their visit. Very occasionally,
and more seriously, communities have held un-
wanted guests hostage.
 Reencountering Development
The other shift has occurred at the level of
the canton, where the parish and cantonal cap-
itals (the former centers of the hacienda-state-
church triumvirate) have been in demise. On
the one hand, old mestizo21 houses are being
purchased by Quichuas, who split their residence
between these capitals and the community. And
at the same time, these old centers have been
partially replaced by new centers linked to other
systems of authority and sources of legitimacy.
Some of these new regional “centers” are linked
to commercial success, as in the semiurbanized
communities of the Gatazos and Santiago (see
above). Others have emerged as a result of an-
other change that was beginning just as the Cor-
nell team was conducting field work: the rise
and subsequent consolidation of the Evangelical
Protestant church. There are many explana-
tions of how this religious change occurred. At
the very least, it seems clear that the ability of
the church to enter the region was itself facili-
tated by land reform and the weakening of the
hacienda; it may also have reflected the deter-
mination of Quichua campesinos to look be-
yond the institutions that had traditionally
dominated them. Several observers have also
suggested that the Evangelical church’s com-
plete ban on alcohol consumption was attractive
to earlier migrants who wanted to invest their
migrant savings in land and housing rather than
alcohol-intensive fiestas (Tolen 1995; Gellner
1982). That these migrants were also dispropor-
tionately represented among a new generation
of more savvy community leaders further strength-
ened the authority of Evangelicalism. Whatever
the explanation, the Evangelical church dis-
placed the Catholic Church. Today many com-
munities in Colta have their own community-
organized center of worship, and indeed some
have several (Tolen 1995; Muratorio 1981).
Meanwhile, the community of Majipamba, where
the mission had its center, is now the place that
is popularly understood as being “Colta.” Its
large churches, radio antenna, and religious or-
ganizations (some of which engage in social-
development activities) mark it as the region’s
new center, at least as seen from the communi-
ties (cf. Tolen 1995).
In some areas within Colta, the formation of
communities was followed by the creation of feder-
ations of communities (this process is discussed in
more detail for the case of Guamote below). Each
with their own acronym—UOCACI (Unión
de Organizaciones Campesinas de Cicalpa),
505
AOCACH (Asociación de Organizaciones Cam-
pesinas Autonomas de Chimborazo), UNASAC
(Unión de Asociaciones Agricolas de Columbe),
AIECH (Asociación Indígena Evangelica de
Chimborazo)—these organizations are new ac-
tors in the governance of Colta. They have
projects; negotiate with government for ser-
vices, and have their own buildings and offices
on which families and community leaders con-
verge one day a week in order to engage in
project-related business, gossip, and squeeze
in a game or two of volleyball. The organiza-
tions also mark one of the latest reversals of
ethnic and institutional relationships in Colta.
In 1988, though many rural development
NGOs worked in Colta, none had its office
there.22 By 1995, the technical team once
linked to one of these federations, AIECH, had
recreated itself as an NGO: the Center for In-
digenous Development (CEDEIN) with its
headquarters in the main mestizo urban center
in Colta. By 1998, it was hiring mestizo advi-
sors, and contracting other long-established
NGOs from other parts of Ecuador to help with
water projects. Some in Colta had begun to ap-
proach its director, José Bueno, to ask him to
consider running for mayor. José smiled at me,
at once modestly and wryly, saying he didn’t
think it was time yet. One day, he implied, it
would be. In the meantime, he wanted to im-
press on me that when I had first known him
and the team, they were being hired by mestizos
to implement the activities of other organiza-
tions: now the tables were turned, not aggres-
sively, but significantly.
The distance between an image of “Indians
in misery” and contemporary Colta is great. It is
an indicator of how profoundly the relationships
between livelihoods, access to resources, rural
governance, and rural landscape have been
transformed as a combined effect of campesino
initiatives, and the state, religious institutions,
and NGOs. This is not to imply that these
changes are unproblematic. People are still very
poor, and many (though not all) would prefer
not to migrate; most people sustain their (or
their families’) residence in Colta with income
derived from elsewhere; differences in access to
land exist, as do differences in income; intrigue
and gossip surround who benefits most from
Colta’s new institutions. But it is important that
arguments about development happen in Colta
now, and not only (nor perhaps even mainly) in
provincial and national capitals.
506 Bebbington
Guamote’s New Geographies of Governance
Bordering Colta to the South, the canton of
Guamote, with an almost entirely Quichua pop-
ulation of slightly less than 30,000,23 more than
ninety percent of whom live in rural communi-
ties located above 3,000 m, has likewise been
transformed in the last three decades, though
the contours and implications of this transfor-
mation differ. In 1974, Guamote had the highest
concentration of land in large estates in all of
Ecuador: today no large or even medium-sized,
individually owned property remains.24 In 1974,
governance—both rural and urban—was dom-
inated by the hacienda; today Guamote is at the
head of a national list of so-called “alternative
municipalities,” where municipal government is
either in the hands of, or works closely with, in-
digenous populations (Muñoz 1998).
The roots of this transformation lie in state
responses to campesino pressure for land. From
the 1950s to 1970s, campesino mobilization for
land in Guamote became increasingly assertive,
bolstered by links to national peasant move-
ments and the communist party. The state, con-
cerned with these levels of unrest, made Gua-
mote the object of a far-reaching program of land
reform. The radical Catholic Church was also
active in pushing for land-redistribution, and be-
came the principal counterpart of the national
land-reform agency’s program in Guamote.25
In some sense, the idea of Guamote as a cen-
ter of chronic poverty (which it was) was insti-
tutionalized in the 1970s (cf. Escobar 1995: 21–
54). Thus categorized, Guamote became the
object of a whole series of development inter-
ventions aimed at reducing this poverty. Land
reform was followed by a series of state agricul-
tural and rural development programs, one
(Fondo de Desarrollo de Areas Rurales Margin-
adas, FODERUMA) coordinated entirely by the
Church, the other (Proyecto de Desarrollo Ru-
ral Integral, DRI), a project within the National
Program for Integrated Rural Development, im-
plemented by the state. Yet it is hard to argue
that these development interventions became a
“destructive” force in Guamote (Escobar 1995:
44). Certainly development complicated the lo-
cal institutional landscape, and while its inter-
ventions (together with popular protest) helped
wrest power from the hacienda, they also en-
dowed development institutions themselves
with an apparent power to exert great influence
on Guamote. Sometimes, under certain leader-
ship, they availed themselves of this power in
order to control—but not always. During the
leadership of Wilson Huilca in the 1980s, the
DRI worked towards the vision of rural develop-
ment in Guamote coordinated and imple-
mented through networks of campesino federa-
tions. Though nowhere written in the project
documents, staff from that period recall the vi-
sion clearly. Ultimately, some campesino leaders
today comment, this was its effect.26
State rural development programs ran more
or less continuously up until the early 1990s,
and were then taken over (in part) by a follow-
up NGO program. The radical Catholic Church
has remained present throughout, and has built
links between communities and church-related
NGOs. Increasingly, though far less systemati-
cally, Evangelically related NGOs have also es-
tablished themselves in some communities. In
this babble of intervention and acronyms, many
agendas and interpretations are at play. No pro-
gram is “innocent.” They are all linked to wider
projects—of building a state presence in the
area, of strengthening campesino organizational
capacities, of establishing Evangelicalism, or in-
deed of fighting off its advance. Yet beyond this,
and in conjunction with the cumulative effects
of schooling, these interventions have had
other effects, deriving in large measure from the
cadre of younger campesinos who were formed
in the very process of mediating between these
external institutions and communities.27 In
some cases, the interventions also deliberately
created federated organizations to act as coun-
terparts in community-level interventions—
federations within which this cadre of campesi-
nos have become active leaders. The effect—in
part deliberate, in part accidental—has been to
change the governance of Guamote. As in
Colta, the nexus of hacienda-priest-state repre-
sentative has been replaced by a new institu-
tional complex through which Guamote is
governed—a complex of communities, federa-
tions, NGOs, the “new” churches, and most re-
cently, the municipal government.
In the early 1990s, one of the two principal
campesino federations in Guamote, the Union
of Indigenous and Campesino Organizations of
Guamote (UOCIG), launched a candidate in
local government elections and won the posi-
tion of mayor (Bebbington and Perreault 1999).
Since reelected, the mayor has initiated a series
of administrative and governance changes aimed
at enhancing community control over the mu-
 Reencountering Development
nicipality, and increasing municipal control over
the federations. All federations are required to
coordinate with each other and the municipal-
ity in the form of a Committee for Local Devel-
opment that has its base within the municipal
building. Under this rubric federations have be-
come the implementing arms of municipal de-
velopment policy. At the same time, a body to
which each community is supposed to send a
representative—a so-called “Indigenous Parlia-
ment” (Parlamento Indígena)—was created, with
the purposes of monitoring municipal actions
and discussing and presenting issues of concern
in the communities. Giving new meaning to an
old landscape, the Parlamento uses the old offices
of the DRI as its base.
These are all incipient changes, and are
fraught with tensions. The two main federations
in the canton—Jatun Ayllu and the UOCIG—
still jostle for power and prominence. UOCIG
is at odds with the municipal government,
whose agents argue that, given the indigenous
control of the municipality, it would make far
more sense for UOCIG to pass its grain mill over
to the municipality; UOCIG wants to maintain
control of the mill itself. Some communities
complain that the federations are not well man-
aged, and particular Quichua individuals tussle
for power, each feeling they have special leader-
ship roles to play. At the same time, some NGOs
support these changes, others maintain a certain
distance. These tensions mark out the micropol-
itics of arguments over strategy and control (cf.
Moore 1998) in which different individuals,
communities, and kin groups have varying opin-
ions over how resources should be used within
Guamote, and who should determine these de-
cisions. Yet, in some sense, these are the con-
tents of the “indigenous self-management” that
so stir people. The very occurrence of these ar-
guments reflects how the governance of Gua-
mote has changed profoundly. Power and con-
trol over local development have moved from
one ethnic group to another (blanco-mestizo to
Quichua), from one type of unit to others (haci-
enda to community and federation) and—in
the period since 1974—from central govern-
ment and line agency to municipal government
and federation.28 With these changes, the image
and meaning of Guamote have shifted. In the
words of one federation leader, Hilario Maola,
“at last we have indigenous self-management”
(1998) (after decades of local governance being
dominated by the church or state rural develop-
507
ment programs). For others among Ecuador’s de-
velopment institutions who would have once
seen Guamote as a miserable bastion of brutish
haciendas and unruly Indian populations, where
planned development intervention (and social
research) was a thankless, and pointless, task,
Guamote is now an innovative experiment in
local governance.
Seen against these political transformations,
economic change has been much more modest.
There is less evidence of accumulation in the
landscape than in Colta, in part because the
greater control exercised by the hacienda over
campesinos in Guamote meant that the early ac-
cumulation linked to migration from Colta was
far less frequent. In some communities, however,
accumulation is beginning. In the communities
of Sablog Rosa Ines and San Isidro, from the one
truck owned in 1988 (by a family that, because
of a personal relationship with the hacienda,
had been able to purchase twice as much land as
any other family), there were, by 1998, seven
families with trucks combining agriculture with
trade. And one and two-story breeze-block houses
have begun to pop up across the landscape. But
even though demographic pressure and the level
of land subdivision in Guamote is less than in
Colta, incomes remain chronically low: Gua-
mote’s three parishes exhibit poverty rates of
near or above 90 percent of the population
(Torres 1998). While the new municipal gov-
ernment has shifted investment from urban cen-
ters to rural areas, and has mobilized additional
resources from external agencies primarily for
rural investments, this has more effect on the
“meaning” of Guamote than on its poverty.
Otavalo and an Ethnic Market Economy29
If Colta and Guamote are viewed as poor,
eroded, and backward in the national imaginary,
the image of Otavalo is quite the opposite.
Known to tourists through its weekend market
and “ethnic” products, and nationally through
traveling Otavaleño merchants in market places
selling textiles for popular consumption, this
weaving center has a special reputation. Otava-
leños are seen as proud, well dressed, and suc-
cessful (cf. Casagrande 1981), and the transfor-
mation of Otavalo into a relatively vibrant
regional economy was seen early on as a possible
model for community development elsewhere
(Salomon 1981). For Salomon, the essence of
508 Bebbington
Otavalo’s success was that through these trans-
formations, Otavaleños had, in Sol Tax’s terms,
sustained a “total pattern that is distinctively
their own” (Salomon 1981: 431). Somehow, he
implied, they had crafted a different type of mar-
ket economy that had become the material basis
through which a highly distinctive place and set
of regional and ethnic identities was being pro-
duced. Delving into ethnographic insights into
how this occurred causes intriguing parallels
with the incipient processes of transformation
in Colta and Guamote to become apparent.
Long before Otavalo’s current textile economy,
the region had a pre-Hispanic weaving culture.
After the Conquest, this culture was harnessed
by the Spanish in the form of obrajes —grim ru-
ral textile factories based on indebted and other-
wise tied Indian labor. Though the fortunes of
the obrajes waxed and waned, they and other
small textile enterprises kept a weaving econ-
omy alive into the twentieth century, by which
time Otavaleño Quichuas were already regain-
ing control of land. A 1909 document of the
town government noted that “[d]ay by day, the
Indian is taking over the lands of the Canton,
albeit by fair purchase” (Salomon 1981: 442).
The cumulative effect was that by 1946, while a
third of Ecuador’s rural population worked en-
tirely on other people’s land, only thirty-one per-
cent of Otavalans did any work on others’ land
(Salomon 1981: 426, citing Salz 1955).
The relative economic and political inde-
pendence afforded by early access to land has fa-
cilitated several transitions in the rural econ-
omy. In some cases, it enabled early migration,
income from which was invested in further pur-
chase of land and other investments (Korovkin
1998). It also created a space for the formation
of small Quichua textile enterprises—at both
a household and small-factory scale. Thus
emerged both a Quichua entrepreneurial class,
as well as a semiproletariat that, employed in
these enterprises, did not need to migrate long
distances in order to make a living, and could
combine farming and weaving. This economy
facilitated the emergence of a trading class
(larger than in Colta, and this time selling prod-
ucts from Otavalo) who, by mid-century, were
traveling nationally and internationally to sell
textiles (Buitrón 1962). Even by the 1960s, a
number of Otavaleños were investing in hous-
ing and consumer durables (Buitrón 1962). As
haciendas kept control of more fertile valley-
bottom land, the emergence of a more dy-
namic campesino agriculture came later than
the household-weaving economy. But in some
areas, campesinos have now also gained access
to this land—not infrequently under the aus-
pices of land-reform legislation, and far more re-
cently, in the context of Catholic Church-
financed programs of land purchase in the 1990s.
In these areas, rather than a weaving economy, a
more intensive form of agriculture dominates
(Korovkin 1997).
That these already market- and profit-
oriented initiatives became the basis of a partic-
ularly vibrant regional economy—one that
has since seen yet more dramatic expenditure
on contemporary-styled housing (Colloredo-
Mansfield 1994), as well as relatively low levels
of migration—is as much due to external inter-
ventions and state policy as it is to popular prac-
tices and initiative. Import-substitution indus-
trialization policies in the 1960s and 1970s
protected textile production for the domestic
market and also fueled an export boom—each
favoring the expansion of the textile economy
(Korovkin 1998). At the same time, the grow-
ing tourist economy (also promoted, if less
clearly, by state policy) provided a particular
niche for Otavalo’s more “ethnic” products—a
niche that its trading elite quickly exploited
(Buitrón 1962; Korovkin 1998).
More specific development interventions
then assisted in the relatively rapid adjustment
of the ethnic economy to the market: first in
weaving and later in agriculture. Otavalo was
one of the selected regions for the work of the
Andean Mission in Ecuador (Jordan 1988), and
the Mission provided technical assistance to
weavers to help them diversify and improve the
quality of their products. This type of support,
coupled with—albeit limited—credit assis-
tance, continued in different forms and guises of
state intervention, serving to reorient Otavalan
production to market opportunities (Korovkin
1998).
If the state provided some of the means
for this reaccommodation and capitalization of
community entrepreneurial activity, nongov-
ernmental and religious (often Evangelical
Protestant) institutions did much the same, par-
ticularly in the form of a range of community-
based savings and loan institutions that emerged
to fill gaps left by the state and private banks.
These institutions supported agricultural and
land-purchase activities as much as textile pro-
duction (Korovkin 1997; 1998).
 Reencountering Development
Otavalo’s economic transformation has been
accompanied by significant political changes.
Local politics had been dominated by urban and
landed groups linked in some way to the haci-
enda or urban textile economy, but even by
1962, Buitrón reported the first Quichua teniente
político,30 signaling the beginning of a more pro-
found set of changes. The progressive early dis-
placement of the hacienda’s political power and
control of land laid the foundation for a progres-
sive, if lagged, shift in the traditional distribu-
tion of political power (Korovkin 1998). Princi-
pally these took form in the emergence of
indigenous provincial federations that became
active in county and national politics—a pro-
cess that began in the 1970s as part of the wider
rise of ethnic organizations in the country (Beb-
bington et al. 1992). Early leaders in these orga-
nizations came from relatively prosperous fami-
lies, marking the clear link between economic
transformation and political change, if also rais-
ing questions about who it was that these new
institutions represented. The two main federa-
tions, FICI (Federación Indígena y Campesina
de Imbabura) and FICAPI (Federación Indí-
gena y Campesina de la Provincia de Imbabura),
each played active roles in the management and
control of the provincial bilingual education
programs of the 1980s and 1990s, and have be-
come active in a subsequent national program
for the development of indigenous communities
(Andrango 1998; Korovkin 1998: 133–34).
Though these changes have not been with-
out their own conflicts among different political,
geographical, and kin-based currents within the
federations (Andrango 1998), their emergence
and role in regional politics has nonetheless
shifted the balance of power in discussions of de-
velopment and access to resources. This marks a
significant shift in the political landscape of the
region—a shift in which, to some extent, a pol-
itics that is also “distinctively their own” is
emerging. In Otavalo, politics, culture, and
economy have all been transformed and, in the
process, become more—if far from perfectly—
inclusive.
Places and Theories
These cases throw light on several of the core
themes in both poststructural and neoliberal
discussions of rural development: themes of via-
bility and place, hybrids and alternatives, and
509
development as destruction. Of course, three
places constitute too small and purposive a sam-
ple from which to draw generalizations, and my
purpose here is not to stretch the material to
make conclusions that cannot be sustained. On
the other hand, elements of these transforma-
tions show certain similarities, I would argue,
with other places of the Andes (Bebbington
1997) in a way that calls into question some of
the generalized claims of both neoliberal and
poststructural frameworks. This in turn calls for
a more inductive, empirical approach to building
development theory that, in working at the level
of both structure and agency, is more modest in
the general claims it makes. Such theory would
serve as much to frame questions about possibil-
ity as to make assertions about determinacy.
Viability, Migration, and Place
Migration is frequently taken as a primary in-
dicator of nonviability. Depending on one’s an-
alytical lens, it can be seen as a consequence of
development destroying agricultural livelihoods,
or as a measure of the incomplete absorption of
land-hungry peasants into urban labor markets.
In these three cases, however, it has been more
than either of these interpretations. It has been
a means of producing, securing, and investing in
rural localities with the effect of transforming
them.
Many dynamics are at play here. Migrants
have consistently used earnings to purchase
land, particularly in those periods when more
land was available because of lower population
densities and when shifts in rural power rela-
tionships weakened the hacienda’s grip on
land.31 Migration has also been an important
way of financing the building of a new architec-
tural landscape as people replace adobe and
thatched-roof houses with more modern build-
ing materials.32 Whether as peddlers, urban la-
borers, or international traders (as in Otavalo
and parts of Colta), these migrants have trans-
ferred income from engagement in labor and
trade markets into the same steady reconquest of
land and space that Grillo has noted in the Pe-
ruvian highlands (1998: 136–37).
To be a migrant may not be the best of all
possible worlds, but the ways in which many
people have used migration also challenge any
simple notion of this behavior as a mere indica-
tor of the destruction of rural livelihood, or im-
510 Bebbington
pending urban transition. Migration has be-
come constitutive of lifestyles that make claims
on more than one place. It has its appeal to those
young adults like Manuel who love to come back
to Colta periodically, but with time, get bored,
and so also like to return to urban or coastal
areas. It has also been used by many, of all in-
come brackets and ages, not just to maintain a
link with rural areas, but also to consolidate
this link. Part of this is clearly an issue of status
and conspicuous consumption (cf. Colloredo-
Mansfield 1994). The community of Sablog Rosa
Ines in Guamote is like many others in that its
showiest house—a two-story house with bal-
cony and mock brick facing—is empty for much
of the year while its owners work in the north-
ern highlands. But much of this sustained link is
also an issue of lifestyle, cultural practice, and
identity. People comment, whether talking of
their homes, or their participation in commu-
nity public-works programs to install water or
electricity, that this is an investment in a place
to which they can return to rest, celebrate fies-
tas, perform discrete agricultural tasks, and ulti-
mately retire. Speaking of Pulucate, one of the
larger communities in Colta, Becky Tolen (1995:
318) similarly comments: “[w]hen those who
own businesses, even houses, in Guayaquil, are
asked why they also built houses in the country-
side, they insist, against all appearances, that
they will someday live in the countryside again.”
Migration also becomes a means of sustain-
ing subsistence agriculture, and thus the prac-
tices linked to agriculture—even if these are
practiced by only some members of the house-
hold, and only occasionally by migrants on their
periodic returns to the highlands. These prac-
tices in turn continue to be constitutive of iden-
tity. Tolen (1995: 130) again captures this per-
fectly:33 “[d]espite the ever-increasing significance
of migration, agriculture is the heart and soul of
life in Pulucate as residents describe it. As a
form of activity, agriculture is thought of prima-
rily as the provision of food to people and ani-
mals. This act, in turn, is the essence of human-
ity and sociability.” The ethnographic record
elsewhere in the Andes similarly emphasizes the
relationship between place, the practices that
coresidence makes possible, and cultural iden-
tity (Allen 1988; Rasnake 1988; Weismantel
1988). Retaining some toehold in farming ap-
pears to be particularly significant to such ques-
tions of practice and identity, however econom-
ically uncompetitive that agriculture may be.
Of course, the structural constraints are
many. People migrate partly as a result of the sys-
tematic lack of public investment in areas of
dominantly indigenous populations and the his-
torical failure of haciendas to invest signifi-
cantly in employment generation. Meanwhile,
accounts of migrant work experiences recall
long hours, heavy burdens, long commuting
trips to work, and cramped living conditions. So
this is not to be naïve. But it is to put the agent
back into migration and to suggest that people
use it for ends that are more than merely ones of
survival, and in many cases, have turned migra-
tion into strategies that both create economic
resources and re-produce rural places. Agricul-
ture may not be competitive, but the livelihoods
that it continues to be a part of clearly are.
Autonomy, Hybrids and Alternatives
The cases all reflect a very significant invest-
ment in rural places on the part of campesinos.
Individually and collectively, people struggle to
maintain these places, and to expand their
degree of control over the social and economic
processes that unfold there. This process occurs
at various levels: the body (in the case of dress),
the locality (as, for instance, when people mon-
itor the passage of others into and out of com-
munities), and the microregion (as in the case of
governance processes in Guamote).
While this statement resonates with Esco-
bar’s claim that development alternatives will
involve the defense of the local, the notion of
“defense” draws too sharp a distinction between
local and external. It implies too static a notion
of the local, and ultimately more antagonism in
the relationship between locality and external
institutions than necessarily exists. Indeed, to
draw on another element of his framework, it
seems more apposite to think of people actively
engaging in the production of “hybridized” lo-
calities than in the defense of a pregiven local-
ity. This hybridization occurs through active en-
gagement in wider labor and product markets,
with the institutions of the national state, and
the institutions of development (discussed in
the following section). Otavalo is the clearest
case in which an engagement with markets has
been central to strategies (including land acqui-
sition and political organization) that help se-
cure greater control of locality. But such engage-
ments are also apparent in the case of migrants
 Reencountering Development
who work periodically elsewhere, investing their
savings in the highlands (see above). Beyond
any assertion of status, this investment is also a
way of creating places that are more subject to
the person’s control: “[t]hese houses are not only
an expression of having one foot in the urban
world: they are also a way of maintaining one
foot outside that world, a refusal to accept that
one is entirely defined by one’s marginalized po-
sition in urban society” (Tolen 1995: 318).34
Of course, Otavalo is something of a sui gen-
eris case. Nor is there necessarily much to cele-
brate in livelihood strategies based on selling
labor cheaply in distant environments, and
building houses that one cannot live in year-
round because highland livelihoods are unable
to generate sufficient income. But something
more is going on. Through various types of orga-
nizations and networks, people are increasing
the extent to which they control these places,
and the processes that unfold in and on them.
This is most clear in the new organizational and
political landscapes of each of these localities.
At a local level, legalized communities have
multiplied across the landscape to become the
basic unit of rural governance. Supracommunal
campesino federations have also developed in
each case, and an increasingly vibrant indige-
nous Evangelical church in most. These organi-
zations have increasingly trespassed into the ter-
rain of the state, seeking to make it a further
mechanism through which local populations in-
crease their influence over the ways in which
places are produced. Guamote is the most obvious
case of this process, but in Colta and Otavalo, el-
ements of the same process are apparent. In-
deed, this process reaches wider through the Ec-
uadorian and, perhaps especially, Bolivian
Andes (Booth et al. 1997).
Each of these strategies and practices involve
engaging with modernizing institutions and
practices. In the process, new rural landscapes
are produced: landscapes with modern building
materials, new commodities, new forms of dress,
vehicles parked outside campesino houses, in-
creasing use of Spanish as an everyday language,
Quichuas sitting behind office desks that were
once the preserve of others, and so on. These are
new landscapes, symbolic of many changes that
have occurred in how people live, and think of
living, in these rural spaces, and of the extent to
which so many of their practices are mediated
through the incorporation of modern ideas,
things, and commodities.
511
“La gente se esta modernizando” [“people are
modernizing”], one young campesino reflected
approvingly as he and I looked out across Sa-
blog’s fields and houses one day. This, though,
was no rudderless modernization, commented a
friend: “you learn from the past. You tie yourself
into tradition and history and bring it forward into
the present.” And in this process of assembling
the artifacts of modern Ecuador in new ways and
combining them with prior practices, these ma-
terials and ideas become indigenous, conveying
a refashioned but still distinct identity.35
More than defending and resisting, people
and their organizations seem to seek means of
using, controlling, and making meaningful these
processes of composition and hybridization. Or
in the words of three Quichua bilingual educa-
tors, “this speaks very clearly of the deep cultural
nationalism [of Quichuas] that must be orga-
nized and directed, but by their own leaders and
social promoters” (Bueno et al. 1983, my empha-
sis).36 As people produce these new places, they
produce new meanings and identities—but still,
as Salomon insists, maintaining “a pattern that
is distinctively their own.”
Coproduction, Institutions and Networks
The transformations that have occurred in
each of the cases discussed here have much to do
with the cumulative effect of individual and col-
lective struggles to build livelihoods and rework
the relations of power that structure patterns of
access to resources and of participation in mar-
kets and political processes. But they also have a
great deal to do with the ways in which state de-
velopment programs, different churches, and an
array of nongovernmental development agen-
cies have engaged with, responded to, and often
promoted these individual and collective strug-
gles. Even if these intersections between popular
practice and the practice of development have
sometimes occurred in quite unplanned and un-
predictable ways, with equally unanticipated
outcomes, they have implications for how we
think about claims that development has failed,
at least in the Ecuadorian Andes.
It would be hard to argue that the situation in
Colta, Guamote, and Otavalo is, today, worse
than in the periods when hacienda-based re-
gimes of power and control dominated these
areas. The transformation of these power rela-
tions is clearly, in part, a result of everyday and
512 Bebbington
organized forms of peasant resistance and mobi-
lization, and land purchase using migrant earn-
ings. But it is also, and primarily, a consequence
of land-reform programs. These programs, in part
responses to campesino mobilization, also became
possible because of pressure from an emerging
national bourgeoisie who saw the hacienda as a
brake on market expansion, and from the U.S.
for land reform throughout Latin America in or-
der to prevent the rise of communism. The leg-
islation created the legal space for campesinos to
recover land, a process that very often involved
collaborations between communities, state of-
fices, the church, and NGOs. Over the last de-
cade, the Catholic Church and an NGO, Fondo
Ecuatoriano Populorum Progressio, completed
this process of complete land transfer in Gua-
mote, using Church funds to finance campesino
purchase of remaining hacienda land.37
These transformations in relationships of ac-
cess underlie the subsequent changes in gover-
nance in each region as new political and social
institutions have been built or assumed more
strength. The emergence of community-based
organizations and federations, Quichua munici-
pal governments, and now Quichua NGOs owes
much to development interventions. While
much of this support came from NGOs and
priests who supported community capacity to
negotiate with state programs and to access re-
sources, some of it came from state programs
themselves. This was frequently because of the
actions of individuals within these programs
who turned institutional practice and resources
to particular purposes. The examples here are
many. Some are of those foot-slogging commu-
nity organizers, like Miguel Rojas, who, by 1997,
could not remember how many communities he
had helped organize and gain the legal status
they needed in order to engage with other pub-
lic programs. Others are educators like Carlos
Moreno, who—from within a government edu-
cation department—managed to mobilize re-
sources for literacy training programs that trained
small armies of community-level promoters (in-
cluding those quoted earlier), many of whom
subsequently assumed leadership positions in
campesino and other organizations. And finally
there are those occasional directors who, like
Wilson Huilca, turned whole rural development
programs into something bearing scant resem-
blance to the project document.38 Again none
of this is to be naïve about political constraints
on development interventions—indeed, after
five years and a change in government, Huilca
was forced out. It is, though, to recognize agency
within these constraints, and to note that its ef-
fects can be lagged, and lasting, even after the
agent’s space has been closed.
The constraints on economic accumulation
are greater than those on changes in local gover-
nance. There has, though, been accumulation
in these areas. Much of this has occurred be-
cause of work done in other places as migrant la-
bor. Nonetheless, the emergence of the weaving
industry in Otavalo (Salomon 1981; Korovkin
1998), the more localized patterns of agricul-
tural intensification in parts of Colta, or cases
such as the campesino agroindustrial complex of
Salinas (Bebbington et al. 1992) suggest that
the conditions for competitiveness can be cre-
ated through external intervention.39 In the con-
text of a globalized economy, understanding the
coproduction of economic possibilities through
the joint actions of people, their networks, and
external intervention thus becomes critical to
any attempt to build counternarratives against
neoliberal formulations of crisis: counternarra-
tives that recognize, however, the importance of
the economic as well as the cultural and politi-
cal dimensions of alternatives.
Rather than read off from different project
documents the ways in which development in-
terventions aimed to discipline and control
these three areas, these cases therefore highlight
the ways in which the practice of development
interventions, and their effects, have opened up
new spaces and opportunities in political and
market spheres. Contra many neoliberal argu-
ments, this does indeed suggest that viability
can be created, and—contra many poststruc-
tural interpretations—it suggests that develop-
ment interventions can play roles in contribut-
ing to such reworkings of power relationships.
None of the above is to make the normative
suggestion that current forms of market and po-
litical participation are ideal. It is, however, to
suggest that spaces have been created through
the combined effect of people’s initiatives and
development intervention. Many people have
used these spaces to secure livelihoods, expand
their control over highland places, and con-
tinue investing in the highlands. Understanding
how such spaces opened up and have been used
is critical for thinking about alternatives. Cate-
gorical assertions about the destructiveness of
development distract attention from these
spaces and the possibilities that inhere in them.
 Reencountering Development
Conclusions
Development as Destruction
or Coproduction?
Poststructural and neoliberal takes on devel-
opment are, both in some sense, narratives on
destruction: in the former case, the narrative is
that development has destroyed local cultures;
in the latter, it is that it ought do so as a “neces-
sary if unfortunate” consequence of fostering
more “efficient” forms of resource use. The cases
discussed here make it difficult to accept such
interpretations.
There are both epistemological and empiri-
cal reasons for challenging the notion that sig-
nificant parts of the Andes do not merit devel-
opment investment because they are not
economically viable. The epistemological case
revolves around the problem of trusteeship (Co-
wen and Shenton 1996), and the very narrow
categories through which such interpretations
define “viability.” The empirical reason is that
though there is clearly a problem of agricultural
viability in many parts of Colta and Guamote,
people have nonetheless composed livelihood
strategies that allow a degree of accumulation.40
They have invested heavily in local institutions
and built form, if not always in agriculture. In
this way, they have kept these places viable and
vibrant even though agricultural livelihoods
meet only a small part of household income
needs. Meanwhile, cases like Otavalo suggest
that in situ viability can be created with time,
and that, indeed, income from migration might
be an important initial stage in this process. The
absence of institutions through which migrant
income can be translated into productive in-
vestment in places like Colta and Guamote is
probably a more important reason for the cur-
rent stagnation of the local economy than any
ecologically determined nonviability.
Poststructural interpretations are similarly
vulnerable to both epistemological and empiri-
cal critique. From these cases at least, it is not
easy to substantiate the view that development
programs and plans are merely exercises in a
form of cultural domination exercised through
the institutions of the modernizing state. While
such interpretations ring true for certain cases,
at certain points in time, these cases suggest the
importance of empirical rather than simply dis-
cursive analyses of these interventions. In these
instances, the effects of these programs have
513
been multiple and, in many instances, have con-
tributed to the restructuring of local power rela-
tions and patterns of access to resources. These
effects in turn depend significantly on the prac-
tices of agents within these programs. Indeed,
there is considerable dissonance between some
of these practices and the sometimes-stated na-
tional policy that these programs were intended
to foster the integration and assimilation of
Quichuas into Ecuadorian society. The implica-
tion is that there are a variety of knowledge-
power regimes at work within the institutions of
development. If that is so, then the ways in
which poststructural analyses have deployed the
knowledge-power/institutions-intervention re-
lationship as the cornerstone of their analyses
may be too blunt, obscuring the scope for, and
the effects of, agency. As Escobar notes, ethnog-
raphies of development are important: but in
this case, they challenge elements of his and re-
lated frameworks. They question the generaliz-
ability of the conclusions as well as some of the
categories being used.
The same seems to be the case in post-
structural discussions of alternatives: these, and
the knowledges that are claimed to go with
them, also seem to be essentialized conceptions.
The emphasis on resistance is, in some sense wel-
come and appropriate, but to phrase it categori-
cally as resistance to state interventions, or op-
position to modernization, seems unhelpful: for
while explaining some phenomena, others be-
come harder to explain when resistance is essen-
tialized in this way. Given this, and given the
apparent logics at work across these diverse
cases, it seems more appropriate to argue at a
simpler level. People encounter development
from their mundane, daily concerns to build and
improve their livelihoods, to build places they
enjoy being in, to give meaning to their lives
through these livelihoods and places, and to
maintain and, as far as possible, to extend the
degree to which they can exercise control over
their conditions of existence. This encounter
can sometimes seem like resistance, sometimes
like accommodation, and sometimes like self-
interest. But first and foremost, people encoun-
ter development in the process of trying to build
something of their own. In these cases at least,
this means that “modernizing development” is
not necessarily resisted but is more often taken,
transformed, and used; and similarly, moderniz-
ing institutions are worked with, used, trans-
formed, and turned, as far as possible, to people’s
514 Bebbington
own purposes. As a consequence, almost every-
thing about development is “coproduced.” This
coproduction occurs at the intersections of in-
stitutional practices and popular practices, and
of different practices within those institutions
and popular sectors (for there is rarely a conver-
gence of local minds on the sorts of home and
meaning that ought to be built, or over who
should have a say in this). Similarly, it is copro-
duced through people’s engagements with a
range of markets, and historical and moderniz-
ing ideas and practices.
The notion of hybridity (Escobar 1995) is
useful here, but needs further elaboration. If
popular practice, livelihood, and culture has al-
ways been hybrid, then it is conceptually (as
well as empirically) inconsistent to celebrate, by
definition, the local over the external. Rather, it
may be more important to understand the pre-
ferred hybrid forms implied in popular strategy,
the terms and relationships of power under
which such hybridization occurs, and the condi-
tions under which those relationships are re-
worked to the benefit of those groups whose in-
terests the author is primarily concerned with.
Such an approach, of course, has many dan-
gers. To some extent, it takes the broader politi-
cal economy as given, looking for room-for-
maneuver within its constraints. This not only
brackets the possibilities that these constraints
might be changed. It can also divert attention
from critical discussion of the extent to which
people have no choice but to pursue their live-
lihoods through practices structured by a glo-
balized economy whose very dominating effect
closes off the possibility of imagining alterna-
tives outside it. On the other hand, a focus on
coproduction can hone attention on the ex-
tent to which room-for-maneuver for generat-
ing income and further extending the social
control of local political and economic institu-
tions might exist within these political eco-
nomic constraints.
Theorizing Up?
If coproduction and hybridity are central to
development as practiced and experienced,
then, as the material reviewed here suggests, ob-
servers ought to be cautious before making ge-
neric arguments about causation and possibility
of the kind made by both neoliberal and post-
structural critics of development in the Andes.
Conversely, the risk is that arguments about hy-
bridity and place lead inexorably to analyses of
the kind that celebrate difference and context-
specific alternatives. Such approaches are vul-
nerable to the accusation of case specificity and
exceptionalism, and can make theory building
or generalization difficult. The approach taken
here, to compare ethnographic and historical
accounts of different localities, is one way of ad-
dressing this problem, though it has methodolog-
ical difficulties of its own. The claim, though, is
that under certain circumstances it is possible to
read across these texts and to suggest the exist-
ence of patterns in the ways in which develop-
ment is experienced locally and in which liveli-
hoods and landscapes are constructed.41
Of course, three cases are too few to make
categorical claims. Such claims about pattern
would obviously assume more authority, the
greater the number of cases, and the greater
the convergence among interpretations of dif-
ferent readers of these cases. As this process of
validated comparison and synthesis moves for-
ward, it becomes easier to theorize and general-
ize. The general argument to be made at this
point, however, is that subalterns are not merely
victims who resist, but also agents who have suc-
ceeded in opening up spaces within states and
markets. They have used these spaces to build
new types of hybrid livelihood, institutions, and
landscapes that are constitutive of quite distinc-
tive forms of place making that, though incor-
porating many symbols of modernity, are indeed
alternative to simple landscapes of moderniza-
tion. It is hard to imagine that the same spaces
would have opened without people having en-
gaged with markets, state programs, and devel-
opment interventions.
This is an argument for building up a body of
ethnographically informed histories and geo-
graphies of development through the Andes.
Working at a regional level, it becomes more
possible to narrate stories that do more justice to
human agency while, at the same time, being
clear on structural constraints. Such mesoscale
knowledge (cf. Turner 1989) also offers greater
hope of reducing the distance between theory
and practice, critique and alternative. In these
cases, it implies that increasing grassroots con-
trol over the ways in which places are produced
and governed is central to alternatives. Building
more accountable political institutions is criti-
cal here, but alone is insufficient. This is so not
only because the grassroots control of such insti-
 Reencountering Development
tutions will never be harmonious, and some
popular interests will always prevail over others.
It is also—and more important—because such
institutions have only limited effect on the eco-
nomic dimensions of livelihood. Yet these eco-
nomic dimensions are critical in determining
the types of rural places produced, and the abil-
ity of people to spend much time actually living
in and enjoying those places.
More viable livelihoods will not be ro-
manced into existence, but must instead be built
up from already existing, and however imperfect
strategies. Understanding livelihood thus be-
comes critical for theory, in order to understand
how places are produced and governed, and who
participates in these processes. It is also critical
for practice—to understand the ways in which
people have created livelihood opportunities
that foster accumulation, as well as the obstacles
to such accumulation.
In addition to studying regional transforma-
tions of the peasantry, and the multiple ways in
which campesinos engage with their political
worlds (as called for by Roseberry 1993), it is
therefore also important to understand the ways
in which rural populations have engaged with
different markets and the public, nongovern-
mental, and ecclesiastical institutions of devel-
opment. Such inquiries would seek to under-
stand the ways in which the practices of (and
within) these institutions have both closed and
opened opportunities for creative forms of popu-
lar engagement with state and market. Ulti-
mately such an approach could identify how ac-
tions have led, and might lead, to change in
both the local and the wider systems in which
campesinos are embedded.
Cowen and Shenton (1998: 50) have argued
that one of the “confusions, common through-
out the development literature, is between de-
velopment as an immanent and unintentional
process as in, for example, the ‘development of
capitalism’ and development as an intentional
activity.” The suggestion here is that mapping
the latter onto the former, and tracing the mutu-
ally constitutive interactions between the two,
is critical to a geography of development. The
challenge is to map onto the geography of capi-
talist development in the Andes the (always hy-
brid) intentions and actions both of people
building livelihoods and places, and of the ac-
tors involved in development interventions.
This would be a mapping exercise concerned to
recognize constraint, but above all, and in the
515
spirit of “reencountering” and rescuing develop-
ment, to understand possibility.
Acknowledgments
This paper has not been an easy one to write, and
it owes a great deal to feedback received in presenta-
tions at Stanford University, the Universities of Brit-
ish Columbia, Texas, and Colorado, and in particular,
to the very helpful discussion of the paper by the Col-
loquium on Agrarian Studies at Yale University. I am
particularly grateful to Jim Scott for his encourage-
ment and commentary. My thanks also to the follow-
ing for their constructive and always challenging
comments: Carolyn Cartier, Hugh Raffles, Don
Moore, Rachel Silvey, Lucien Taylor, Dodie McDow-
ell, Billie Lee Turner II, Christian Kull, Michael
Woolcock, Donna Goldstein, Arun Agrawal, Gaston
Gordillo, Dan Segal, Bill Durham, Alex Keyssar,
Trevor Barnes, Manny Schegloff, and Eric Wolby.
The suggestions of five anonymous referees were very
helpful. Thanks also to Jim Robb for the map. I would
also like to acknowledge all that I have learned from
my exchanges on peasant economy with Octavio So-
tomayor, Julio Berdegué, and Nico van Niekerk, and
from my many hours discussing Colta with Becky Tolen.
The preparation of the paper was supported by a
Hewlett Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies
in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.
Notes
1. For some of the many reflections on its implica-
tions for development geography and anthropol-
ogy, see Blaikie (1998); Watts (1993); Peet and
Watts (1996); Watts and McCarthy (1997);
Yapa (1998); Crush (1995); Rigg (1997); Simon
(1998); Moore (1999); and Little and Painter
(1995).
2. This family of broadly modernizing initiatives is
generally referred to in such writings as “the de-
velopment project” (Simon 1998).
3. “Do you or don’t you support drinking water
projects?” after reading Escobar, one otherwise
sympathetic reader asked aloud. Escobar himself
recognizes this problem: “[o]ne of the most com-
mon questions raised about a study of this kind is
what it has to say about alternatives” (1995:
222). James Ferguson, who has pursued a similar
line of critique, similarly notes: “[t]here seems to
be a certain frustration with the fact that my
analysis traces the effects or mode of operation of
an apparatus without providing any sort of pre-
scription or general guide for action” (1990: 279).
4. I want to emphasize two points here. First, it
should be noted that my focus is on rural commu-
516 Bebbington
nities and small towns: I do not address issues of
urban development. Second, and more impor-
tant, as the paper develops, I put more emphasis
on the limitations of the poststructural position.
This is not because I wish to imply that I have
more sympathy with the neoliberal—quite the
opposite. Rather, it is that, because my norma-
tive sympathies lie with those positions implied
or explicit in the work of poststructural authors, I
find the empirical analyses and programmatic
implications of such approaches that much more
disappointing.
5. In their discussion of Marglin’s (1990) call for
alternative development in India, Cowen and
Shenton (1996: 470) note a similar irony. Mar-
glin’s recommendations are, they suggest, ulti-
mately the same as those of Conservatives in the
British colonial period who also argued that im-
provement could only come from Indian society
rather than state policy. “What irony! What was
once the part played by conservative doctrine
becomes the script for a present-day, very self-
conscious radicalism” (1996: 470).
6. At one level, this critique seems to square poorly
with the fact that writers on alternative develop-
ment almost consistently argue that the authors
of alternatives ought to be popular actors. The
problem, Cowen and Shenton (1996: 458–59)
imply, is that ultimately the few still determine
the contents of alternatives for the many because
“only those conscious of being so free, and being
relatively developed, can assume the burden of
trusteeship . . . for the purpose of the relative har-
mony of authentic development” (1996: 458).
7. Based on a reading of development planning in
Colombia, Escobar’s is already a view from the
Andes. It has been elaborated in Apffel-Marglin
and PRATEC’s (1998) more specifically Andean
critique of development. This critique similarly
sees development as a failed extension of a Euro-
pean enlightenment project: “Development is a
symptom of the senile dementia . . . of the
plague” of European colonization (Grillo 1998:
137).
8. As I shall discuss below, recent debates in the
Andes question elements of this argument, as the
notions of failure and hopelessness have been
used by other parts of the bureaucracy to argue
that certain programs and types of investment
ought be terminated for reasons of fiscal tight-
ness. Again the problem derives from a treat-
ment of bureaucracies and states as unitary, over-
looking their internal struggles for resources,
power, and the definition of policy.
9. This is not to imply that such authors do not also
see the need for broader social change.
10. Ferguson’s (1990) epilogue similarly emphasizes
the role of such social movements.
11. Escobar’s writing on Afro-Colombian communi-
ties, however, begins to ask some of these ques-
tions (Grueso et al. 1998).
12. Pile and Keith (1997: xi) suggest that we are in a
period “where everyone seems to be talking
about resistance and domination.”
13. Thanks to Lucien Taylor for making this paren-
thetical observation.
14. Julio Berdegué, former director of the small-farm
technology transfer program of the Ministry of
Agriculture, notes that it “was questioned from
two quite different positions, that nonetheless
complemented each other in that they called for
the termination of the program: the technocrats
of the economic sector, for whom the campesi-
nado are a pointless waste of time (una huevada
sin destino), and that it therefore made no sense
at all to waste US$20 a year [in per-capita pro-
gram expenditure] since it was better to support
their migration to the city and into other lines of
employment; and [secondly] the populists” (Ber-
degué 1999).
15. Another approach would be to combine ethnog-
raphies and survey research—a potentially fruit-
ful approach, though also with its methodologi-
cal and logistical problems.
16. It also merits saying that although the paper fo-
cuses on Ecuadorian material, I have come to
these interpretations on the basis of studies in
other parts of the Andes, especially in Bolivia. In
conducting this other research, I have been for-
tunate enough to collaborate with Tom Carroll,
Chema García, Leonith Hinojosa, Adalberto
Kopp, Luciano Martinez, Diego Muñoz, Perico
Perés, Godofredo Sandovál, Tom Perreault, Galo
Ramón, Victor Hugo Torres, the late Hernán
Carrasco, and not least, Denise Bebbington.
17. The 1990 census counts 47,658 people in Colta
(INEC 1992: 13).
18. This is not to imply that all families use the strat-
egy. Some leave permanently (or only return for
one fiesta a year), yet most families maintain the
foothold in Colta, reflected in the fact that pop-
ulation continues to increase although more
slowly than other cantons in Chimborazo (INEC
1992).
19. The “comuna,” a legally recognized administra-
tive unit since the early 1930s, in essence, re-
placed the hacienda as the basic unit for the gov-
ernance of rural space. I use the term community
to refer to these legally constituted entities, and
not to imply a homogeneity of interests within
local populations.
20. I use the term “surveillance” deliberately: com-
munities monitor arrivals and departures not
only of local people, but also, more important, of
strangers. Cars and people on foot are stopped
and asked who they are and where they are
going. Periodically, forms of “popular law” are ex-
ercised by the community, when it identifies
 Reencountering Development
wrong-doers. In areas to both the north and
south of Colta, this has recently led to tensions
between community authorities and the official
judicial and police system.
21. “Mestizo” refers to mixed-race white/indigenous
people who, in Colta and Guamote, typically
managed, served, and traded with the haciendas,
and would subject Quichuas to a range of abuses
(Maynard 1965).
22. One family-planning NGO did, though, have its
office there.
23. The 1990 census counts 28,058 people in Gua-
mote (INEC 1992: 13).
24. I say “individual” because some communities own
large extensions of land (generally high grass-
lands) in common.
25. An official in the regional office of IERAC (the
former national institute for land reform) re-
ferred to the priest in Guamote as “a very good
friend of IERAC,” facilitating the rapid imple-
mentation of land redistribution programs in the
area (Andrade, 1989).
26. I refer to discussions with Hilario Maola, Genaro
Guaylla, and Agapito Muñoz.
27. A number of these leaders had parents who had
greater access to land. This meant that their chil-
dren had to migrate less frequently, and so were
better positioned to assume this mediating role.
28. There has, though, been little change in the gen-
dering of local government in Guamote.
29. This section draws on the work of others, and
only a few interviews of my own.
30. The teniente político is a local state authority.
31. Lehmann (1986) similarly identifies migration as a
key source of income for land purchase in Carchi.
32. These patterns are akin to Jokisch’s (1998) won-
derful evocations of the landscape transforma-
tions associated with international labor migra-
tion in Cañar.
33. Becky Tolen’s work (1995) and my own informed
each other, and I want to acknowledge the way
in which she helped shape my understanding of
Colta.
34. Although Catherine Allen’s (1988) ethnogra-
phy of a Peruvian community primarily investi-
gates the role of coca chewing in cultural iden-
tity, she ends her book with a vignette that
conveys the sense that younger adults, who have
migrated to the city of Cuzco, seek ways of com-
bining a presence in urban areas and modern
livelihoods, with a presence in their communi-
ties of origin. She talks of José, the son of her
principal informant: “José . . . mentioned that he
would like to sell the taxi and buy a truck. The
taxi was fine—but he liked driving in the coun-
tryside. With a truck he could haul produce be-
tween Cuzco and Sonqo [his community], and
between Cuzco and Cachin [his wife’s commu-
nity]. Emilia [his wife] could go along with him,
517
driving back and forth between the city and their
ayllus. “Now that could be a good life, he com-
mented wistfully” (1988: 235–36).
35. This notion has been especially well articulated
for the case of indigenous dress in the Andes
(Zorn 1997; Tolen 1995); but also see Jokisch
(1998) for the case of housing, and Bebbington
(1993) for that of agricultural practice.
36. This is from a document written by three Qui-
chuas for their training course to become bilin-
gual educators. One of them, Jose Bueno, subse-
quently became very active in one campesino
organization, and now leads the Quichua NGO
CEDEIN, mentioned in the discussion of Colta.
37. The program was, though, a national one.
38. This observation, of course, cuts both ways: the
institutional weaknesses that allowed these indi-
vidual actions can also allow less savory uses of
public resources. Either way, the point is that there
is much scope for agency within these institutions.
39. Evans (1995, 1996) has similarly argued that in-
dustrial comparative advantage can be created at
a national level via certain types of state-business
embeddedness. The suggestion here, following
North and Cameron (1998), is that such com-
parative advantage can also be created at a sub-
national level.
40. This is to challenge the neoliberal frameworks
on their own epistemological grounds.
41. The parallel, in some sense, is that while each re-
gion has its own indigenous peasant movement,
these movements are also able to coalesce na-
tionally around certain shared concerns and ex-
periences, however internally debated these na-
tional platforms might be.
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