By Aram Ziai
Four decades after its beginnings, postdevelopment (PD) has become an established approach in development theory. Its core claim that we should ‘reject the entire paradigm of development’ and look for alternatives, has become well-known. However, is postdevelopment still part of development theory or is it something else? This post, based on a longer, more nuanced article in the EJDR tries to address this question.
Is PD a development theory?
PD rejects the idea that there is a universal scale of ‘development’ with the West on top, where non-Western societies can only advance on this scale by becoming like the West and adopting its economic, political and scientific (or epistemological) models. While alternative ‘development’ merely seeks alternative ways to achieve the objective of a ‘developed’ society, alternatives to ‘development’ can be found in all those practices which do not share this objective and go beyond these models. Consequently, this means that PD is very skeptical towards any attempts to ‘develop’ the supposedly ‘less developed’ societies, which is also a crucial element of development theory, being the very academic discipline of which PD is perceived to be a part of. Starting from here, we can make three claims:
1: PD shares normative development theory’s concerns with improving people’s lives. However, it does not believe this improvement can result from modernising or ‘developing’ societies, and at least its progressive proponents respond to the question ‘who can define what is an improvement?’ by cleary stating: ‘only the people concerned’.
2: PD argues that industrial modernity destroys traditional livelihoods, while not providing adequate “modern” livelihoods for all those who fell out of the subsistence sector. Therefore, according to this line of argument, the marginalised forge ties of solidarity, thereby creating “new commons” in order to survive.
3: PD perceives development theory as arising from the historical context of decolonisation and the cold war, related to a programme designed to legitimate the capitalist world order in the global South through the promise of affluence after the colonial order of North-South relations appeared increasingly illegitimate. Therefore, PD can be seen as a sociology of knowledge of the discipline of development theory: it reveals the specific political and historical perspective from which a certain construction or representation of the world arises – in this case the perception of global inequality not as a result of colonial exploitation, but of incomplete processes of ‘development’ –, and particularly its relationship between knowledge and power.
Is PD a postcolonial theory?
If postcolonial theory, in a simple definition, deals with the legacies and continuities of colonialism, PD clearly qualifies, by pointing to how the post-war programme of ‘development’ was a continuation of conquest and subordination with (usually) more peaceful means to ensure access to the resources and markets of the global South. Nevertheless, this new discourse of ‘development’ -in contrast to colonial discourse – accepted the anticolonial and universalist claim that non-Western people were able to govern themselves and would not need European tutelage.
PD also aligns with postcolonial theory in pointing to processes of Othering, which. construct people as ‘less developed’ to legitimise interventions in their way of living, or to bring forward Eurocentric assumptions about the superiority of the West and the backwardness of the non-West, which is also the foundation of Western knowledge production: While sociology, economics and political science were dealing with the Western societies defined as the “normal case”, the respective Development Studies (development sociology, development economics, development policy) dealt with the “deficient versions” in the global South.
Yet at least the conservative or neo-populist part of PD does differ from postcolonial theory (not necessarily from decolonial theory though) in assumptions about authentic indigenous cultures and simple binaries of good indigenous and bad Western and capitalist culture.
According to the obvious parallels above we can conclude that PD certainly can be seen as a postcolonial or decolonial theory: one with specific focus on the way the global South was constructed after the second World War – and on the relations of economic and epistemic dominance that this knowledge production perpetuated after the formal end of colonialism.
PD in conversation with anarchist theory
Early on in the academic debate about PD, Nederveen Pieterse wrote: “Through post-development runs an anti-authoritarian sensibility, an aversion to control and perhaps an anarchist streak” . He is certainly correct: PD argues that people do not want to be subjected to interventions against their will which take place in the name of ‘development’ or the ‘greater common good’. They are rejecting the principle of trusteeship that legitimises ‘development’ experts to devise such interventions on the basis of their superior knowledge. Yet this principle of trusteeship is by no means limited to countries of the global South: it is a central characteristic of the modern state and interventions against the will of the people also take place in the global North – usually not in the name of ‘development’, but in the name of ‘employment’, ‘growth’ ‘energy security’ or simply ‘progress’, as the conflicts around the Dakota Access Pipeline in the USA or around coal mining in Hambacher Forst in Germany demonstrate. The claim to know what is best for the people, to represent their interest and pursue the common good, is one asserted by all states, be it the nearly extinct species of (supposedly) communist dictatorships or the flourishing (supposedly) liberal democracies.
The opposite claim, asserted by PD as well as anarchism, is that the people themselves know best what they need and how their lives can improve. While a liberal democratic position hopes for the states and international institutions to implement policies beneficial to the poor (e.g. delivering services), the anarchist position would entrust this task to the poor themselves – and support their struggles.
And here we are coming full circle: PD’s origin is not a revolutionary academic idea, but the theorization of ongoing practices and struggles of communities and movements. However, the criticism of paternalism, towards anarchism or towards PD, is far from absurd. An anarchism faithful to the idea of prefigurative politics, of course cannot order people to be anarchists. PD theory which diagnoses industrial societies to be sick and prescribes the return to vernacular subsistence communities might use a more sympathetic universal scale to measure and diagnose but occupies the very subject position of the ‘development’ expert: the social doctor who knows how others should live.
This is why the Zapatista idea of the ‘world in which many worlds fit’, the pluriverse, is central to PD thought. To relinquish the idea of a blueprint for a better society in favour of self-determined little worlds in which the peoples themselves decide how to live is the very basis of PD (and contemporary anarchism), seeing it as the only way to avoid a reiteration of earlier progressive vanguards unaware or oblivious of the power authoritarian element implicit in the claim to such knowledge. Therefore, it is very telling that two of the most significant recent PD publications include the “Pluriverse” already in the title (here and here), as a counter-concept to the universe of one model which fits all.
Yet even from this perspective, there must be some limitations and conditions to self-determination. The first limitation arises from the universalist premise that one’s way of life must not harm others. The imperial mode of production and consumption which relies on the appropriation of cheap labour and cheap resources in other parts of the world, is therefore not a legitimate way of living. Equally illegitimate would be ways of life in which some members are harmed or do not enjoy equal rights and disagree with this (!), the latter being necessary to prevent paternalism. Another condition would be equal opportunities to influence the rules of the group in which one lives, which, given the unequal conditions of today’s world, requires a massive effort to ‘level the playing field’
So while PD is closely related to postcolonial and anarchist theory, its relation to development theory is more ambiguous: it shares the desire to improve people’s lives while rejecting the idea that outside experts may know better than they themselves how to do it – and points to the historical origin and Eurocentric elements of the discipline.
Aram Ziai is Professor of Development and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kassel, Germany
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