Development. Copyright 2000 The Society for International Development.

. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (200012) 43:4; 1114; 016341.

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Beyond the Search for a Paradigm? PostDevelopment and beyond

ARTURO ESCOBAR
ABSTRACT Arturo Escobar reviews the critiques around postmodernist critiques of development. He looks at the reading strategies employed and argues for a cultural politics of difference. KEYWORDS modernization, livelihoods, locality, poststructuralism

Unsettling development The status of development has become again difcult to ascertain. During the rst decades of the development era, and despite an array of positions, there seemed to be clear agreement on the need for some sort of development. Modernization and dependency theories were the paradigms of the day. Littleby-little this consensus began to erode because of a number of factors, both social (the increasing inability of development to fulll its promises, the rise of movements that questioned its very rationality) and intellectual (the availability of new tools of analysis, chiey post-structuralism). In the 1990s, poststructuralist critiques succeeded in casting a serious doubt not only on the feasibility but on the very desirability of development. Going beyond most previous critiques, development was shown to be a pervasive cultural discourse with profound consequences for the production of social reality in the so-called Third World. The deconstruction of development by the poststructuralists resulted in the possibility of imagining a post-development era, one in which the centrality of development as an organizing principle of social life would no longer hold. In the second half of the 1990s, these analyses became themselves the object of poignant criticisms and rebuttals. Many of these works are directed against what is now described as the post-development school or position. I do not want to suggest that this new set of works constitutes a unied position or even a trend.

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However, in the limited space allowed, I want to treat them as a group by outlining what I consider to be the main concerns expressed by them, on the one hand, and what I believe is at the basis of these concerns, on the other. For the sake of brevity, I will also accept the identication of the post-development school with three visible works, The Development Dictionary (Sachs ed, 1992), Encountering Development (Escobar, 1995), and The Post-development Reader (Rahnema and Bawtree eds, 1997). These volumes are singled out in several of the articles in question as the main texts on postdevelopment, although there are other authors added at times to this set (e.g. Rist, 1997; Vandana Shivas ecofemism, cf. Kiely, 1999).1 Dening the readings I see three main claims in the anti-post-development literature: post-development critics presented an overgeneralized and essentialized view of development, while in reality there are vast differences within various development strategies and institutions; they romanticized local traditions and local social movements, ignoring that the local is also embedded in global power relations and that, indeed, many struggles today are about access to development; they failed to notice the ongoing contestation of development on the ground. Almost certainly behind these critiques are serious disagreements about the nature of social reality (e.g. for the Marxist critics, discourse has little to do with reality, while for poststrucuralism it is the main vehicle for the production of reality), and about the character of political practice and the agent of social transformation. These disagreements arise in great part out of contrasting paradigmatic orientations (liberal, Marxist, or poststructuralist). I cannot address these differences here, but I would like to highlight the importance of reecting on these paradigmatic differences if we are to construct a more meaningful dialogue about development, post-development, or what have you that is, if one is to go beyond my paradigm or yours, to borrow Pieterses (1998) catchy title. It seems to me that it is possible to distinguish three main reading strategies on the part of the antipost-development writers. These reading strategies are conducted from, and in the name of, a particular location. I should say that in most cases you nd two or even the three strategies at play, some times creating strange bedfellows brought together by their anti-post-development position. These critiques of post-development, it seems to me, can be grouped as taking place under three banners: the real, better theory, and the people. Some critiques of post-development In the name of the real This strategy is practiced mostly by authors of Marxist orientation (e.g. Kiely 1999; Pieterse 1998; Peet and Hartwick, 1999; Babbington, 2000; Little and Painter, 1995; Berger, 1995). It restates the primacy of the material over the discursive. For these authors, the problem is not so much with development, even less so with modernity, as with capitalism. The critical modernism (Peet and Hartwick, 1999) espoused by some of these writers is commendable in many ways, yet it can be said that it arises out of their unwillingness to accept the poststructuralist insight about the importance of language and meaning in the creation of reality. This is a valid epistemological choice that has political consequences. In the name of (better) theory This strategy comes chiey from fellow poststructuralists, which makes it the most puzzling (e.g. Moore, 2000; to some extent Arce and Long, 2000; Crew and Harrison, 1998). It says something like: You represent development as homogenous while it is really diverse. Development is heterogenous, contested, impure, hybrid; it is subverted at the local level. This assertion is undoubtedly true. However, these authors fail to acknowledge (a) that their own project of analyzing the contestation of development on the ground was in great part made possible by the deconstruction of the development discourse (in the same way that this latter was

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Escobar: Beyond the Search for a Paradigm?

enabled by earlier critiques, from Illich, Nyrere, Cabral, Galtung, Freire and Fals Borda to the dependentistas, and Foucault); and (b) that the poststructuralist project was a different one: that of slaying the development monster, to paraphrase GibsonGrahams (1999) metaphor in their debunking of capitalocentrism in political economy. As Graham says, scratch a post-structuralist, and you will often nd a realist.2 We did not try to represent the real (of the Third World). This was everybody elses project, and part of the problem from the postdevelopment perspective. In the name of the people This is perhaps the most problematic strategy, and takes different forms. It might suggest that postdevelopment advocates do not understand power (power lies in the material and with the people, not in discourse); that what is at stake is livelihood and peoples needs, not theoretical analyses; that because of our romantic, neo-luddite and relativist stance we patronize the people and overlook their interests (e.g. Kiely, 1999; Pieterse, 1998; Storey, 2000; Little and Painter, 1995). I see this as a reection of the chronic realism of many scholars that invariably label as romantic any radical critique of the West or any defence of the local. At stake in this position is also a realist notion of social change that is problematic because it does not unpack its view of the material, livelihood, needs, and the like. This view also assumes that any contact with development and the commodity is a desire for development and the commodity on the part of the people, not the enactment of a cultural politics in which development and the commodity might mean very different things. Lastly, this position is blind to the potential of social movements in mounting important challenges to capitalism and development, as the growing transnational networks against globalization are demonstrating in the most recent times. In this strategy, there is a triumph of the realpolitik at the expense of other visions of the possible. Finally, it is difcult not to raise the issue of the social basis of the anti-post-development critique. Without invoking self-serving identity politics, it is puzzling that almost without exception the antipost-development critics are white male academics in the North. The post-development movement was at least more diverse at this level, including men and women from both the North and the South, living and working in both the North and the South. Besides our rejection of development, perhaps the most common denominator was that of being middle class in our respective countries or countries of origin. But we came from many places and experiences and had diverse intellectual and political interests and connections to social movements. And if we refused to theorize about how things must be instead, it was not because of a relativizing conceit (what Kiely labels the Pontius Pilate attitude), but precisely because, in the spirit of poststructuralist genealogies, we see all too well how this normative stance has always been present in all development discourses, even if naturalized and normalized. For the post-development advocates, this naturalized morality domesticates our ethical sensibilities, our thinking, and our actions in ways that can only serve the interests of those in power. Beyond paradigms? As I mentioned, there are many valuable aspects of the criticisms I reviewed so hastily here. I nd great value, for instance, in Arce and Longs (2000) project of reclaiming and pluralizing modernity via strategies of development that run counter to the dominant model (yet one might raise the question of the different genealogies of modernity, lest we continue to uphold a European matrix at the root of all modernities); or in Babbingtons (2000) call for a notion of development that is at once alternative and developmentalist, critical and practicable (yet in this case we would need to unpack further his notion of livelihood; there is no livelihood without culture); or in Fagans (1999) suggestion that the cultural politics of post-development has to begin with the everyday lives and struggles of concrete groups of people, particularly women; or, nally, in Sylvesters (1999) warning about being mindful of the effect on our accounts of the world of our distance from those we write about. This means that the dialogue goes on, and as the poet might have said, we should be thankful less about arriving at the right notion of development or post-development than at the fact that these constructs gave us

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the opportunity to undertake the journey in the rst place. For me, this is a journey of the imagination, a dream about the utopian possibility of reconceiving and reconstructing the world from the perspective of, and along with, those subaltern groups that continue to enact a cultural politics of difference as they struggle to defend their places, ecologies, and cultures.

Notes 1 The main texts that to a greater of lesser extent adopt an explicit anti-postdevelopment position are: Babbington, 2000; Berger (1995); Blaike (1998); Crew and Harrison (1998); Kiely (1999); Lehmann (1997); Peet and Hartwick (1999); Pieterse (1998); Rigg (1997) and Storey (2000). I have not included here those texts that, while critical of the poststructuralist analyses, take them constructively as an element for redening development theory and practice. See for instance Gardner and Lewis, (1996); Grillo and Stirrat (1997); Fagan (1999); Schech and Haggis (2000). Finally, there are texts that do not t easily into any of these two categories, such as Arce and Long (2000); Sylvester (1999). 2 Conversation during the meetings of Association of American Geographers, Pittsburgh, April 1999.

References Arce, A. and N. Long (2000) Anthropology, Development and Modernities. London: Routledge. Babbington, A. (2000) Reencountering Development: Livelihood Transitions and Place Transformations in the Andes, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 90(3): 495520. Berger, M. (1995) Post-Cold War

Capitalism: Modernization and Modes of Resistance After the Fall, Third World Quarterly, 717728. Blaike, P. (1998) Post-modernism and the Calling out of Development Geography. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, Boston, April. Crew, E. and E. Harrison (1998) Whose Development? An Ethnography of Aid. London: Zed Books. Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fagan, G.H. (1999) Cultural Politics and (post) Development Paradigms, in Munck, R. and D. OHearn (eds) Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm, pp. 179195. Gardner, K. and D. Lewis (1996) Anthropology, Development and the Postmodern Challenge. London: Pluto Press. Grillo, R.D. and R.L. Stirrat (eds) (1997) Discourses of Development. Anthropological Perspectives. Oxford: Berg. Kiely, R. (1999) The Last Refuge of the Noble savage? A Critical Assessment of Post-Development Theory, European Journal of Development Research 11(1): 3055. Lehmann, D. (1997) An Opportunity Lost: Escobars Deconstruction of Development, Journal of Development Studies 33(4): 568578. Little, P. and M. Painter (1995) Discourse, Politics, and the

Development Process: Reections on Escobars Anthropology and the Development Encounter, American Ethnologist 22(3): 602616. Moore, D. (2000) The Crucible of Cultural Politics: Reworking Development in Zimbabwes Eastern Highlands, American Ethnologist 26(3): 654689. Peet, R. and E. Hartwick (1999) Theories of Development. New York: Guilford Press. Pieterse, J.N. (1998) My Paradigm of Yours? Alternative Development, Post-Development, and Reexive Development, Development and Change 29: 343373. Rahnema, M. and V. Bawtree (eds) (1997) The Post-Development Reader. London: Zed Books. Rigg, Jonathan (1997) Southeast Asia. The Human Landscape of Modernization and Development. London: Routledge. Rist, G. (1997) The History of Development. London: Zed Books. Sachs, W. (ed) (1992) The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books. Schech, S. and J. Haggis (2000) Culture and Development. A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Storey, A. (2000) Post-Development Theory: Romanticism and Pontius Pilate politics, Development 43.4. Sylvester, Ch. (1999) Development Studies and Postcolonial Studies: Disparate Tales of the Third World, Third World Quarterly 20(4): 703721.

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