By Caroline Cornier
The idea of progress falls under what anthropologist Anna Tsing designates as ‘unity’, a ‘unified coordination of time’, a singular beat. The recent workshop “Unity in Diversity – The Future of Development Studies” raised questions whether the discipline should move on to study the world’s consonant ‘global challenges’ or rather continue focusing on the specific rhythms and trajectories of ‘late developers’.
Two major lines of divide
The discussions made clear that today’s Development Studies is mainly divided along two major lines:
1. The epistemological Knowledge-Materiality Divide
2. The geographical North-South Divide
Based on the insight that knowledge production in Development Studies has often contributed to perpetuating colonial rationalities and related inequalities, it comes as no surprise that decolonial scholars Lata Narayanaswamy (University of Leeds) and Eyob Balcha Gebremariam (University of Bristol) called for further deconstruction of the ‘coloniality of [development] knowledge’. From this epistemic perspective, moving away from Global South-focused Development Studies and “Big D” discussions of economic transformation towards ‘global Development Studies’ appears as a significant step in overcoming colonial knowledge production. University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute’s director Sam Hickey refers to this shift as a sign of intellectual ‘growing up’.
More structuralist-orientated scholars, including Kate Meagher (London School of Economics) and Pritish Behuria (GDI, University of Manchester), saw a shortcoming in this perspective. In particular, they pointed to its unfamiliarity with historic development theory from the Global South In seeing historic development theory from the Global South. In these scholars’ view, the latter theory is already decolonial in nature because of its interest in structural economic transformation. To stress her point, Meagher cited Southern schools of thought such as Dependency Theory, Transformative Social Policy research, the Development State Paradigm and, most recently, Political Settlement Theory. In her view, these theories highlight the role of postcolonial economic structures in reproducing economic inequality. According to Meagher, the current decolonial theory carries the risk of obscuring these material structures and, by extension, economic inequality, the raison d’être of Southern Development Theory.
Talking past each other instead of constructively debating
The unacknowledged intersecting epistemological and geographical divides in the understanding of ‘development’ appear to lie at the heart of Development Studies’ current disorientation, causing for ‘development’ to be either seen as an emancipatory practice or an external imposition. The lack of a clear definition of ‘development’ and the resulting ambiguity of Development Studies’ goals seems to lead development researchers to talking past each other, instead of constructively debating.
Though based on a justified concern for epistemological justice, the call for global development perspectives potentially reduces Development Studies to irrelevance. This is particularly visible in Development Economics, as exemplified by a stark disagreement between the former World Bank economist Ravi Kanbur (Cornell University) and Pritish Behuria on how many countries have achieved development since the 1960s. Due to neoclassical economists’ increasing belief in the disappearance of low-income countries and the rising availability of household datasets, the discipline has been gradually integrated into mainstream economics and micro-level modelling. As a result of this transformation, Development Economics not only scarcely contributes to the analysis of economic inequality but appears to deny its very existence.
In continuing to exclusively focus on industrialisation and material sovereignty as incarnation of Southern emancipation and ‘progress’, structuralist development perspectives neglect the increasing undesirability of emission-intensive production in the face of climate crisis and over-production. Whereas the global nature of climate change should certainly not hinder us in seeing the technological South-North dependencies it produces, theories failing to take the vulnerable and finite nature of our planet into account will ultimately struggle to gain wide intellectual and political support. To borrow Tsing’s terms once more, acknowledging development’s ‘polyphonic rhythms’ and its frequently oppositional needs, appears an essential prerequisite for achieving unity in Development Studies’ quest for a fairer and a more sustainable future. Our goal should be to help these needs be shaped and materialised in accordance with our planet’s limitations – both in the South and the North.
The workshop was organised by Pritish Behuria (GDI, Manchester) and Andrew Sumner (King’s College London and EADI President) as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of EADI ahead of the recent DSA Conference.
Caroline Cornier is a doctoral researcher at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester working on the Political Economy of commodity dependence based on the case of cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire.
Image: taken from Krylov, Ivan Andreevich, and Bernard Pares. Krylov’s Fables. Westport, Conn: Hyperion Press, 1977. Print.