Corbridge The Impossibility of Development Studies

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The (im)possibility of development studies

Stuart Corbridge
Online Publication Date: 01 May 2007
To cite this Article Corbridge, Stuart(2007)'The (im)possibility of development studies',Economy and Society,36:2,179 211 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03085140701264869 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085140701264869
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Economy and Society Volume 36 Number 2 May 2007: 179 211
The (im)possibility of development studies

Stuart Corbridge
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Abstract
Development studies is commonly understood to be committed both to a principle of difference (the Third World is different, hence the need for a separate field of studies) and a principle of similarity (it is the job of development policy to make them more like us). This double commitment has led to important challenges to the intellectual standing of the discipline and/or its object of study, development. This paper begins by reviewing five theorems which pronounce the impossibility of development studies. It then offers a more sympathetic account of the field. While recognizing the urgent need for development studies to be critical and at times oppositional, the paper suggests that an allied commitment to public policy-making can be taken as a sign of maturity. Development, and development studies, should be understood as sets of social practices, or technologies of rule, the organization and effects of which need to be (and in key respects are) contested and subjected to political and scholarly review. Keywords: development; development studies; impossibility theorems; technologies of rule; morality of critique.
Introduction Development studies is an unusual enterprise.1 It is committed both to the principle of difference (the Third World is different, hence the need for a separate field of studies) and to the principle of similarity (it is the job of development policy to make them more like us).2 This is a crude characterization, but it is not an inaccurate view of how many people see the subject. In this paper, I will argue that the double commitment that lies at
Stuart Corbridge, Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. E-mail: s.e.corbridge@lse.ac.uk Copyright # 2007 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online DOI: 10.1080/03085140701264869
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the heart of development studies is a source of strength a sign of maturity even as well as of weakness.3 That it is a source of weakness is well understood. The field of development studies has been painted in recent years as irrelevant, teleological, colonial in intent, masculinist, dirigiste and/or a vehicle for depoliticization and the extension of bureaucratic state power. It stands accused of being the source of many of the problems of the so-called Third World.4 Some economists have called for a return to mono-economics, or the doctrine that the essential truths of neo-classical economics hold independent of time and place.5 Many on the post-Left, meanwhile, have placed developmentalism under the spotlight of the post-colonial turn. They prefer to see development as a set of experimental techniques that produces the Third World as a pathologized site of difference/underdevelopment. It then stands ready to be mended by the agencies of a richer First World. In some cases, as for example in the work of Arturo Escobar, the call has been floated for the dis-invention of development. Escobar and others have also called for the de-linking of the less economically accomplished countries from forms of governmentality which lock them into a game in which they cannot hope to compete.6 What is less well understood is that the forms of rule which have been proposed by development practitioners including, most recently, doctrines such as participation, good governance and sustainability are neither singular nor are they unidirectional in their effects. It is right that the concept(s) and practice(s) of development are rendered problematic. We also need to understand that the origins of development studies were closely linked to the beginnings of a Cold War between the First and Second Worlds, and that the broader development business is often beholden to geopolitics.7 Recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq tell their own story. Yet it is obvious that there are social and economic problems in poor countries, as in all countries, and that these problems must be addressed by particular forms of government and non-government intervention, the effects of which cannot always be anticipated. Governmentality is not something that can be escaped from, at least not if a person, group or country wants to participate in generalized forms of production, exchange and rule.8 It follows that development studies should not be condemned for its schizophrenia; rather, we need to understand and constantly challenge the particular forms of governmentality that are sponsored in its name. In addition, I want to propose that what might be called the responsibilities of critique should not be reduced to the oppositional, nor should deconstructive forms of criticism be elevated above other forms of critique, whether radical (free market or Marxist), pragmatic or apparently non-judgemental. Development studies might be under sharp attack, but it should not be put on the defensive simply because of its commitments to difference and sameness. What matters is the way in which these commitments are combined, not the fact that they are made at all. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The second section outlines four of the most pressing critiques that have been made of all or some parts of
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development studies since 1980. The third section notes some objections that have or can be raised against the first three impossibility theorems set out in the second section. In the fourth section I consider how the work of Partha Chatterjee sits alongside and develops the fourth of these theorems. Chatterjee is less well known in development studies than Arturo Escobar, Deepak Lal, Jean-Philippe Platteau, Robert Bates or James Ferguson, but his work has considerable implications for the subject. I am most concerned here with Chatterjees work on the contradictions of colonial and post-colonial modernity. This work leads him to conclude that the idea of civil society has little purchase for poor people in what he calls most of the world. Chatterjee suggests that poorer people must deal with governmental institutions through mediating agencies in political society. In the fifth section I consider the value and purchase of Chatterjees critique of civil society, and also of development more broadly. There is considerable merit in this critique. At the same time, I challenge the usefulness of the civil versus political society distinction around which Chatterjees argument is fastened. I do so with reference to village meetings in Bihar and West Bengal, India, and with regard to such everyday markers of modernity as queuing (waiting in line), complaining and photocopying. The sixth section tries to generalize these observations. I focus on the epistemological basis of impossibility arguments and on the politics of the critique they embrace. Many critics of development studies share a commitment to an ideal outside. This is a perfect vantage point from which all things are judged. I suggest that the moral high ground that is sometimes sought by these critics (Escobar and Lal more so than Chatterjee) is no high ground at all. Max Weber once argued that an intellectual in the service of moral forces must take responsibility for the actions that are proposed, both explicitly and implicitly, in his or her name. I reflect on this observation in the sixth section and in a short conclusion.
Impossibility theorems The claim that development studies is in crisis will ring hollow in some quarters. If we look at the number of journals in the discipline, for example, and the vitality of them (as measured, for example, by acceptance to submission rates (less so in terms of impact factors)) the subject is doing well. Economic Development and Cultural Change was the first journal of development studies. It began publication in Chicago in 1952. Later came Development (US, 1957), the Journal of Development Studies (UK, 1964), Development and Change (Netherlands, 1970), World Development (US, 1973), Third World Quarterly (UK, 1979), the Journal of International Development (UK, 1989) and Progress in Development Studies (UK, 2001), along with more focused journals for development professionals and area studies specialists. Development sociology supports its own specialty groups on both sides of the Atlantic, as do development geography, development anthropology and
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development economics. New programmes in development studies are continuing to open in Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. There are fewer programmes in the global South, but large numbers of students from countries there have taken graduate-level courses on development issues. My own university, the London School of Economics and Political Science, takes it as read that the word development in the title of a Masters degree is a positive selling point. Many of the students who graduate from these degrees hope to work for the development business. Some aim for the UN institutions, others for national aid agencies, NGOs and campaigning groups, and still others for management consultancies like Price Waterhouse Coopers. Away from the worlds of business and masters degrees, however, there is a looming sense of unease about the enterprise of development studies.9 In part, this stems from misunderstanding about the purpose and aims of the field, as we shall see. Within human geography and cultural anthropology the word development is so mistrusted that some departments are reluctant to hire in this area or to mount courses under its name, the preference being for modules on globalization or post-colonial studies. The idea that development might be immanent, rather than intentional, to use a helpful distinction proposed by Cowen and Shenton, is largely ignored.10 In part, though, the unease I detect is underpinned by a growing number of intellectual arguments that demand attention. These arguments advance one or other version of an impossibility theorem. They maintain as thinkers as diverse as Mohandas Gandhi, Ernest Schumacher, Paul Baran and Andre Gunder Frank maintained before them that development, as conventionally defined, cannot be prosecuted successfully in ex-colonial countries for one or more reasons.11 Here, I briefly consider four versions of the impossibility theorem. The propositions advanced by one version will sometimes be held in some degree by another. They are treated under separate headings for convenience.
The misconceptions of development economics The most influential critique of development studies since 1980 has come from the neoliberal (or liberal) Right. As always, there were antecedents. Milton Friedman denounced foreign aid programmes shortly after they began in the 1950s, and Peter Bauer was dubbed Lord Anti-Aid by the British newspaper, The Observer, for his own forthright views on the dangers of foreign assistance.12 Bauer suggested that the Third World was called into existence by the giving of aid, an argument that was later adapted by Arturo Escobar to serve a very different political project. Bauer also developed a challenging and largely consistent line of thought on the absurdities of dirigisme in West Africa. He spoke up in defence of the African entrepreneur. He also joined with Anne Krueger and Harry Johnson in linking dirigiste economic strategies to the
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formation of predatory political regimes and the generalized pursuit of rentseeking behaviour.13 These were the first stirrings of what John Toye called the counterrevolution in development theory and policy (1987). They were brought to the boil in 1983 in a pamphlet written for the Institute of Economic Affairs by Deepak Lal. Lal took issue with The poverty of development economics what he referred to in a short paper for Finance and Development in the same year (Lal 1983b) as The misconceptions of development economics. In each case, Lal could not bring himself to lose the scare quotes. Lal argued that ideas have consequences, and that the bad ideas of development economics (studies) had led to especially bad consequences. The doctrine of planning had led to unproductive rent-seeking and the misallocation of scarce resources. Governments built grandiose projects for political reasons and/or because they tried to second guess the market. The doctrine of import-substitution industrialization had opened a door to lame-duck industries and huge balance of payments problems. The mistaken pursuit of equality had caused governments to neglect the importance of economic growth. Indians living out of India were known to work hard and to be entrepreneurial. The same entrepreneurial classes in India had been crushed by the dirigiste instincts of a badly informed ruling elite. That elite had condemned India, in the memorable phrase of Raj Krishna, to a Hindu rate of growth of about 1 per cent per annum per capita. Lal maintained that these and other bad policies were avoidable. They were the result of a doctrine of development economics that had turned its back on the essential truths of orthodox economics. The economies of the Third World were not substantially different from those elsewhere. Rather, they had been made different at great social cost. For Lal, the basic propositions of neoclassical economics hold in poor countries just as they hold in rich countries. Economic agents, including peasants and other supposed satisficers, respond rationally to price signals and other incentives. Informal credit markets enhance the efficiency of institutions in environments of endemic risk. Free trade benefits producers and consumers alike. Not all countries need to industrialize. The fruits of economic growth will trickle down as labour markets tighten. Markets fail, but so do governments and usually to worse effect: there is no general case to improve the outcomes of a necessarily imperfect market economy (Lal 1983b: 11). In short, there is no case for developing a separate body of theory to deal with the economic problems of poorer countries.
Post-developmentalism Neoliberal thought and policy made a huge impact on economic and social affairs in the 1980s. This was true in the UK and New Zealand just as it was in much of the global South following structural adjustment. The success of the
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counter-revolution also deepened the impasse in Marxist development studies.14 The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union further called into question the case for socialist development strategies. In some cases, although clearly not in all, the radical critiques of the 1960s and 1970s were reworked in the light of the post-colonial turn. Post-structural theories began to affect the humanities and the social sciences (economics largely excepted) at about the same time that versions of the counterrevolution were making their mark on public policy. Edward Said published his famous analysis of Orientalism in 1978. He argued that, without understanding Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage and even produce the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period (Said 1978: 3). Said developed this insight in light of his reading of Foucault on power and governmentality. Although he later broke with Foucault on the importance of universals in practical politics, Said accepted the importance of unlearning . . . the inherent dominative mode [of reasoning].15 It took some time for these ideas to make their way into development studies, or the study of development. To the best of my knowledge, the work of Foucault was first applied in a systematic fashion to a study of discourse and power in development by Arturo Escobar in 1984. Another eleven years followed before Escobar published his book-length treatment of the making and unmaking of the Third World.16 In Encountering Development , Escobar maintains: (a) that a discourse of development was invented by the United States and its allies during the Cold War period, and was initiated by President Harry Trumans announcement on 20 January 1949 of a fair deal for peaceloving people in the whole world (Escobar 1995: 3); (b) that the prosecution of development required the discovery of mass poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America (ibid.: 21); this discovery in turn sharpened the divisions between the so-called First and Third Worlds and made experts from the former responsible for the salvation of the latter; and (c) that the dream of development which emerged after the Second World War:
progressively turned into a nightmare . . . . instead of the kingdom of abundance promised by theorists and politicians in the 1950s, the discourse and strategy of development produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression. The debt crisis, the Sahelian famine, increasing poverty, malnutrition, and violence are only the most pathetic signs of the failure of forty years of development. (Escobar 1995: 4)
Once again, the possibility of capitalist development in the South is turned into an impossibility. But there is an important twist here. Gunder Frank blamed that impossibility on the asymmetries of capitalism. The core exploits
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the periphery. Deepak Lal and his colleagues blamed the inefficiencies of dirigiste capitalism. In contrast, Escobar and his fellow post-developmentalists voice their opposition to the discourse of development itself. It is the dream of abundance that now comes under attack. Escobar draws on Foucault and Said to sketch out what he calls the discourse of development and its knowledgepower effects. But the counter-politics of Encountering Development is informed at least as much by feminism, cultural theory and environmentalism. It also mixes insights that could have been taken from Frank and Schumacher. In the conclusion to his book, Escobar invites the reader to imagine a postdevelopment era (ch. 6). The Third World, Escobar, contends, has been and still is produced as an effect of the discursive practices of development practices which are linked to an economy of production and desire, but also of closure, difference and violence (ibid.: 214). To imagine a post-development era is to reject these discursive practices. The unmaking of development will be slow and painful, and should not collapse into a veneration of predevelopment traditions (ibid.: 215 17). The task rather, says Escobar, is to celebrate difference and hybridity. The job of political activity is to carve out spaces of empowerment where ordinary people can define their lives outside the imprisoning architecture of developmentalism.
Embeddedness and generalized morality A third and rather different version of the impossibility theorem was developed by Jean-Philippe Platteau in a long and challenging paper that was published in two parts in the Journal of Development Studies in 1994. The gist of Platteaus argument is as follows. The World Bank and other leading development agencies are keen to promote market-based economic reforms across the developing and post-communist worlds. They subscribe to one version or another of the mono-economics doctrines promoted by the counterrevolution in the 1980s. For market economies to work, however, it is first necessary that the problem of trust is solved. Economic agents need to know that their contracts will be honoured. The World Bank seems to believe that the agenda of good governance will suffice to deal with this issue, and can be made to do so in short order. Platteau disagrees. The first part of his argument holds that the establishment of legal codes and other
institutions [is] not sufficient to make the market order an effective regulating device. They need to be actually supported by norms of generalized morality aimed at fulfilling the following functions: to reduce the enforcement costs entailed by external sanctioning; to help transform a situation in which recourse to external sanctions is necessary into one in which a good equilibrium (such as that represented by mutual trust) becomes possible and to guide the society towards that position. (Platteau 1994: 535)
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The second part of his argument draws on Max Weber and holds that the formation of generalized morality is exceptional. To date, it has been confined to post-Tokugawa Japan, and to Western Europe and its settler colony offshoots. In Japan, the Meiji state used its strong control of the education system to promote a Japanese version of Confucian ethics that placed emphasis on loyalty to the Emperor and selfless devotion to the country (ibid.: 791). In Western Europe, the Christian church and a growing culture of science and reason helped to promote a somewhat unique history rooted in a culture of individualism pervaded by norms of generalized morality (ibid.: 770). Generalized morality denotes a willingness to treat distant strangers on the same basis that one would treat a member of a kin group, at least in regard to market-based exchanges. Platteau contends that the formation of generalized morality happens slowly and is very far from being the norm. It is not a matter, then, of judging societies that are imbued with limited group moralities against this exalted standard. Platteau has no difficulty with the difference dimension of development studies: indeed, he highlights the value of taking place seriously. At the same time, Platteau is deeply sceptical of the normalization impulse in development policy. In this case, this is the suggestion that generalized morality and (thus) good governance can be imposed quickly and effectively from on high or from outside. In Platteaus version of the impossibility theorem, it seems clear that in regions with a bad civic record, even if formal institutional changes are adequate, history will move slowly and the efficiency of economic exchanges will improve only over decades (ibid.: 804). Overly confident ideologies of development which suggest otherwise are badly informed or dishonest.
Depoliticizing development A similar mistrust of hubris is to the fore in a body of work which challenges the technocratic zeal that is built into most versions of development policy, and particularly into the construction of development projects.17 A number of excellent books have emerged in recent years to challenge what their authors describe as the depoliticization of development. Here I highlight only three. For many people, the single most interesting book to be published on development issues in the 1990s was James Fergusons account of development, depoliticisation and bureaucratic power in Lesotho (1994 [1990]). Ferguson uses Foucaults work on discourse, power and governmentality to fashion a seemingly counter-intuitive account of the ways in which development projects in Lesotho have failed to reduce rural poverty or promote agrarian capitalism, but have succeeded in extending bureaucratic state power into the Lesotho countryside. Ferguson insists this success was not consciously willed by a central agency. It was the result of powerful constellations of control that were never intended and in some cases never
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even recognized, but [which] are all the more effective for being subjectless (1994 [1990]: 19). The principal such effect, Ferguson concludes, was that the technicalization of development the endless repetition of expensive failed development projects exerted a powerful depoliticizing effect on the ways in which development could be talked about and planned. The development industry became the anti-politics machine of the books title. Important questions about the gendered distribution of land and other assets, as well as about the build-up of bureaucratic state power, were stilled by the noisy talk which surrounded a mountain of development projects. Power and voice were transferred to experts, outsiders and well-paid state functionaries, and away from local farmers and herders. Fergusons remarks on loss of voice, or on etatization , are mirrored in bodies of work that do not share all of the conclusions of the depoliticization school. Robert Chambers and Norman Uphoff have long cautioned that it is difficult to put the poor first if their voices are drowned out by those of well-paid experts.18 Many neoliberals would also agree that the over-development of the state in sub-Saharan Africa has much to do with that regions dependence on foreign aid, both in its programme and project modalities. As I suggested earlier, the impossibility theorems that I am reviewing here are not sealed off from one another. There is also common ground between Fergusons rendition of the anti-politics machine, and Peter Uvins disturbing account of the ways that the development enterprise laid some of the foundations of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Uvin argues that well-meaning development professionals in Rwanda acted for the best of motives and generally bought into the World Banks depiction of Rwanda as a development success story. By ignoring questions of power, social exclusion and economic inequality, however, their actions served to bolster the power of Rwandas ruling Hutu elite. They got used to not being held to account. Alex de Waal has made a not dissimilar argument about the culpability of the humanitarian industry for the reproduction of famines in Darfur.19 I want to conclude this section, however, by pointing to two books which more directly embrace the forms of reasoning that Ferguson deploys in The Anti-Politics Machine. The first of them, published by John Harriss in 2001, goes under the title Depoliticizing Development , and focuses on the World Bank and social capital. The politics of Harriss are more conventionally of the Left than are those of Ferguson, an observation I shall come back to in the fifth section. Harriss takes aim at the decision of the World Bank in the mid-1990s to position the previously obscure and poorly understood notion of social capital as the missing link in development (Harriss 2001: 2, citing Grootaert 1997). He first explains how the World Bank settled upon what he considers to be the least interesting account of the meaning and significance of social capital, that of Robert Putnam.20 He then charges that the Bank adopted Putnams work on social networks itself little more than the idea that Its not what you know [that counts] its who you know! (ibid.) for reasons unbecoming. Putnams notion of social capital could in principle be made to fit
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with conventional forms of project analysis and measurement. More importantly, it emphasizes social cooperation and harmony. This allowed the World Bank, in Harrisss view, to turn a blind eye to the huge and growing inequalities in the distribution of the means of power, violence, production and distribution that ensure the disempowerment of the worlds poorest. Those who are unwilling to contemplate political challenge to existing structures of power, Harriss writes, end up on the wrong side (ibid.: 14) and the possibility of development is undone. The second book I have in mind was published in 2005 by David Mosse. It builds on work carried out by Mosse in the 1990s.21 Cultivating Development is a study of the Indo-British Rainfed Farming Project (IBRFP). This was a major participatory development-cum-livelihoods project that was set up by the British and Indian governments in dryland areas of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, with funding from the UKs Department for International Development. Mosse was a consultant to the project. Cultivating Development presents a rich ethnography of how a well-thought-out development project really works. It is less concerned with state power than The Anti-Politics Machine, and more focused on the matter of participatory development. Mosse shows how the community organizers of the IBRFP were well versed in the ways of participatory development and participatory rural appraisal (PRA) techniques. In the field, however, they found it necessary to reach out to their targets (poor households in project villagers) through the good (or bad) offices of more powerful villagers. Mosse confirms that it was the most powerful villagers who were quick to learn the languages of the project. They learned to present themselves as poor and were able to monopolize most of the benefits that the project put on offer. Poorer people had less time to learn the ways of the IBRFP. They were also mindful that they depended on better-off farmers for work and forms of social insurance. It made little sense to challenge the hegemony of the village elite for the sake of a bee hive or a few days work. In the end, then, the IBRFP, for all the fine intentions that informed its design, helped at the margin to reproduce and not undermine local structures of power. It offered further proof, we might conclude, of the impossibility of (real) development through the project mode.
A brief critical interlude The first three impossibility theorems dealt with in the previous section would seem to pose more severe problems for the field of development studies than does the charge of depoliticization. John Harriss, for example, is calling for the re-radicalization of development studies, not for its dissolution. In contrast, Deepak Lal has argued that there is no case for development economics. From here it is a short step to concluding that orthodox economics can coexist with area studies: what does development studies add to the mix? Many
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post-developmentalists have gone further. Development studies is read as the controlling ideology of developmentalism. The latter is denounced as violent and contradictory. It promises the Third World a future that cannot be realized within a developmental framework. Platteau, for his part, simply but strongly challenges the presentism of most development policy: the idea that they can be quickly made like us. Such presentism informed the declaration of the 1960s as the United Nations Development Decade. It also informs the agendas of structural adjustment and good governance. But things are not always as they seem. The first two versions of the impossibility theorem are so starkly posed that their threat to development studies is correspondingly weak. The counter-revolution in development theory has had, and continues to have, significant impacts upon development policy. A de-romanticization of the state in the Third World was long overdue, and credible arguments can be made in favour of the sorts of liberalization policies pursued recently in China and India (not that either country has come close to embracing World Bank orthodoxy).22 There is also some evidence to suggest that some structural adjustment policies have worked in some key respects in some countries in sub-Saharan Africa.23 The idea, however, that economic growth can be trusted to self-regulating market forces is no longer in vogue. It is widely accepted that markets will work efficiently only if they are placed in a robust institutional framework and if information flows are symmetric. Development economics has moved on from the days of Nurkse, Myrdal, Rosenstein-Radan, Balogh, Prebisch and Singer Lals targets in 1983. The orthodox economics that Lal trumpets must now take on board the work of heterodox economists like Douglas North, Dani Rodrik, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz.24 (That said, Jeffrey Sachs admits in his recent work on The End of Poverty that when he left graduate school he had not been truly trained to address (2005: 89) the issues that would confront him as an economic advisor in Bolivia or a host of other countries. His experiences in Latin America persuaded him that history and geography mattered. Later on, it seems, Sachs was also persuaded that power and politics matter: that the policy stance of agencies including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are very far from being informed only by economic theory. US interests also count for a lot as most students of development could have told him when he graduated.)25 The challenge posed to development studies by post-developmentalism is also weak, as several commentaries have shown.26 Escobars work of 1995 takes much the same tack as Lal did in 1983. Development theory and policy is reduced to a few simple axioms that may or may not have held in full in the 1950s and 1960s. Work by scholars including Lewis and Rostow defines the development discourse, something that is consistently placed in the singular.27 There is little or no sense that the development community adapts, learns or moves on. The partiality of this approach is then extended to the dream into nightmare metaphor that structures Encountering Development . Development is converted to mal-development and its legacies are reduced to famine, debt
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and impoverishment. Post-developmentalists refuse to acknowledge that the Age of Development (1950 2000) saw improvements in global life expectancy the likes of which had never been seen before (outside sub-Saharan Africa). The average person in China and India was living more than twenty years longer in 2000 than in 1950.28 Nor is there any acknowledgment of the rise of the newly industrializing countries. The suggestion that less economically accomplished countries should reject developmentalism is nave. As David Lehmann rightly concludes, the post-developmental turn, for all that it keeps the raw nerve of outrage alive, is, finally, an opportunity lost.29 Platteaus work is more serious. He is right to challenge the extreme optimism of large parts of the development industry. His account of economic and political life in the developing world is informed by years of fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of what he has to say on the operations of the state there is backed up by the work of eminent Africanists.30 It also resonates with Robert Bates (2001) insightful account of Prosperity and Violence: The Political Economy of Development. (Bates notes that economic development cannot occur when the means of violence are decentralized, nor will fragile states promote a sense of citizenship where elites are able to access global flows of capital and arms in such a way that they avoid the structures of accountability and voice that taxation is prone to induce.) In this case, however, the charge that is brought against development studies is empirical rather than ontological. Platteau is not concerned with markets or development in the abstract. He wants to document the speed with which market-support institutions and reputation mechanisms can be built up to foster the sorts of trust that are necessary for extended divisions of labour or trade. His critics, of whom Mick Moore is in the vanguard, have argued that Platteau is too pessimistic for his own good.31 There is ample evidence, they suggest, that the cultural traits to which Platteau draws attention can be quickly changed if new incentive structures are put in place. Cultural codes are more malleable than Platteau implies.
Partha Chatterjee and the fifth impossibility theorem If I am right so far, the possibility of development studies is more secure than some critics would like to believe. What matters is the constitution of development studies and the considerations it makes of power and politics. Before I review this matter further, however, I want to consider a fifth challenge to the discipline. I will develop this challenge with particular reference to the work of Partha Chatterjee, although it is by no means confined to his writings. Partha Chatterjee was born in Bengal in 1947. He is a gifted musician and writer of non-fiction, as well as being a public intellectual in high standing. Chatterjee has worked for many years at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta. More recently he has combined this position with
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another in anthropology at Columbia University in New York. His work overlaps with that of Sudipta Kaviraj, Mahmood Mamdani and Nicholas Dirks, three of his colleagues at Columbia. I focus on Chatterjee here, then, not because he is ploughing a lonely furrow there are many points of engagement with the intellectual community but because he poses in particularly acute form another reading of politics and the possibility of development studies.32 The treatment of depoliticization in the fourth theorem is largely conducted in terms of private or institutional will. For Harriss and Ferguson, in their different ways, the content of development policy has been actively evacuated of politics by agents of the World Bank and other key lending agencies (or NGOs). By implication, politics can be restored by an active will, or by struggles within and around these institutions. For Chatterjee, in contrast, the depoliticizing agendas of the development industry are more a function of the deployment of governmentality in the post-colonial world. They are a result of the particular ways in which civil and political societies have taken shape in most of the world, and thus of the nature of democratic politics outside the source areas of Western political theory. Chatterjee has been writing about politics and economics in Bengal and India since the time of the Emergency (the suspension of democratic rule in India in 1975 7). As we might expect, his work has matured and even shifted direction over this period, but some common themes can be detected almost from the start. One such theme is the impossibility of fully western forms of modernity in the ex-colonial world. In Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (1986), Chatterjee argues that anti-colonial nationalism in India was forced to adopt both forms of universal politics that valorized the modern (the adoration of Western science and reason that was so marked in the discourses of Nehru and Ambedkar) and forms of politics that sought to valorize the difference and intrinsic worth of cultural traits that were distinctively Indian (so well to the fore in the body and politics of Gandhi). Colonial forms of rule were at once embraced and resisted, but the forms of resistance (as, for example, through the mobilization of more homogenized versions of Hinduism or Islam) were themselves marked by colonial forms of governmentality. The Census of India required Indians to describe themselves as straightforwardly Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, and as Brahmin, Vaishya or Untouchable. As Nicholas Dirks puts it, The colonizer held out modernity as a promise but at the same time made it the limiting condition of coloniality: the promise that would never be kept (Dirks 2001: 10). The movement from subject to citizen, then, which was at the heart of the modernist narrative (and which today is at the heart of development studies) was from the outset undermined by forms of colonial rule and nationalist resistance that could not help but valorize the more limited identities of particular groups. Further, the delivery of India from the British was not accompanied by a flowering of citizenship, participation or civil society. Chatterjee maintains that leaders like Gandhi and Nehru were keen to bring the masses into the
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anti-colonial struggle, but they also wanted to keep a lid on their forms of involvement. The masses were not to be trusted, at least not until they had been educated or made modern (certainly for Nehru).33 In any case, the levers of power in the post-colonial state were seized by small groups of elite Indians who had learned English and the ways of the colonial power. Notwithstanding the excellent and expansive Constitution of India that they helped to promulgate in 1950, these men (and they were overwhelmingly men) proceeded to govern India almost entirely through structures of rule that reached back to the Government of India Act of 1935, if not long before. Chatterjees second argument here, as I understand it, is that the contradictions which opened up in post-colonial India between a language of universal citizenship and positive discrimination on the basis of caste and ethnicity; between the five yearly vote and daily disenfranchisement; between a rhetorical commitment to socialism and the persistence of enormous inequality; between the world-views of elite and vernacular Indians were the necessary corollaries of two absences in the public life of the new nation. On the one hand, Chatterjee suggests, colonial rule in India prevented the emergence of a dominant class of capitalists. A limited bourgeoisie had to press for the capitalist transformation of the country in alliance with other social groups. It had to share power with richer farmers, and this group blocked much needed land reforms. It also had to share power with powerful bureaucrats who blocked the deregulation of Indias economy. Indeed, it was the state itself that was required to push through what Chatterjee and Kaviraj, following Antonio Gramsci, called a slow and molecular passive revolution in India, with all the contradictions that this etatist revolution implied. The Emergency was its Bonapartist moment.34 The second absence has to do with civil society and thus with the political. It has been a consistent argument of Chatterjees more recent writings that the classic (which is to say Western) orderings of capitalism, nation and civility were reversed or at least disrupted in the worlds of the colonized.
The story of citizenship in the modern West moves from the institution of civic rights in civil society to political rights in the fully developed nation-state. Only then does one enter the relatively recent phase where government from the social point of view seems to take over. In countries of Asia and Africa, however, the chronological sequence is quite different. There the career of the modern state has been foreshortened. Technologies of governmentality often pre-date the nation-state, especially where there has been a long experience of European colonial rule. (Chatterjee 2004: 36; see also Mamdani 1996)
The subjects of the colonial powers became formal citizens of the new state at Independence. In Chatterjees view, however, the republican ideals that were put before them as members of the nationalist struggle were cast aside to make way for a developmental state which promised to end poverty and backwardness by adopting appropriate policies of economic growth and social
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reform (ibid.: 37). Here is the real and wider source of the depoliticization that Harriss and others have complained about. Chatterjee sees the origins of developmentalism in India as growing out of the contradictory impulses of the nationalist movement in a country imprisoned by colonial forms of governmentality. At Independence, and certainly after the death of Gandhi, the leadership of that movement substituted planning and a sense of governmental obligation to named political groups for the messier and ultimately threatening worlds of democratic struggle. The new citizen of India like citizens in most of the world was constituted as a supplicant or beneficiary of a ruling elite which sought the endorsement of the citizenry every few years in the great anonymous performance of citizenship [the vote] (ibid.: 18). Seen from this perspective it is a mistake it is unscrupulously charitable in Chatterjees memorable phrase to dangle before ordinary Indians the blandishments of participatory development or good governance. Nor does it make sense to seek the consecration of every non-state organization as the precious flower of the associative endeavors of free members of civil society (ibid.: 39). Civil society is something that emerged in a meaningful way in Western societies before an age of bureaucratization. In India and most of the world, the advantages of civil society are enjoyed only by a closed association of modern elite groups, sequestered from the wider popular life of the communities, walled up within enclaves of civic freedom and rational law (ibid.: 4). Few people in the ex-colonial world approach figures in authority as individual citizens who are aware of their rights. Ordinary people instead inhabit the worlds of political society. Their links to government are as members of named populations (of tribals, slum-dwellers, drought-prone farmers) and through the mediating actions of a political boss what in India would be called a dada (powerful political broker/big brother). Slum-dwellers in Calcutta who are camped illegally on government land still expect the authorities to provide them with water, electricity and perhaps even schooling. They offer their votes and muscle to local members of the ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) those who can get the job done on their behalf. In Mumbai, similar functions are performed by street-level members of the ruling Shiv Sena.35 As Putnam might put it, its who you know that matters, not what you know. A popular phrase in Brazil holds that: To our enemies, the law; to our friends, everything! (DaMatta 1991 [1978]: 168). This is precisely the distinction that Chatterjee explores in India and for most of the world. Chatterjee is arguing, or can be taken to argue, that the impossibility of development studies resides in its fetishization of concepts (civil society, untutored participation, generalized morality, decent behaviour, the sanctity of the law) that have little meaning for ordinary people: those people who are required to get by in the dirty and complicated worlds of governmentality and political society. Worse, it demeans the efforts and achievements that these people might claim for themselves: the poll booths captured by the lower castes, the electricity lines tapped into, the police officer bribed, the land
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illegally occupied, the assumption of state power by rough men and women like Laloo Prasad Yadav or Mayawati.36 In these respects, Chatterjee seems to be saying, the development industry has been in the business of depoliticizing the Third World in not just one but two respects. The revival by the postcolonial state of colonial forms of governmentality encouraged the twin processes of bureaucratization and technicalization. This in turn promoted planning as the handmaiden of the developmental state. At the same time, the mistrust of popular politics that was apparent at the time of many nationalist struggles has helped to slow down the formation of what might be called civil forms of democratic politics in the post-colonial era. Ordinary people are then required to make their way in precisely those political societies whose dissolution is called for, perversely, in the agendas of good governance.
Queuing, complaining, photocopying Neither development nor development studies has been a major target for Partha Chatterjee in his many writings. His focus has been on patterns of state formation, nationalism and governmentality in the post-colonial world. It is clear, nonetheless, that his work has profound implications for the field of development studies. In his account of The Politics of the Governed , Chatterjee develops a perspective on popular politics in most of the world that is sharply at odds with the sanitized worlds of civil society and good governance that are trumpeted in the development policy literature. In most respects, his is a deeply unromantic view of the possibility of economic and political progress in the developing world. Chatterjee lays emphasis on the false promise of postcolonial modernity: on the impossibility of the ex-colonized following the path to development of the ex-colonizer. Unlike Escobar, he is not a prophet of post-developmentalism. Chatterjees work is grounded in that of Gramsci and Foucault. He is well aware that development cannot be wished away. If he was minded to offer advice to the development community, it would perhaps be to guard against false optimism (much like Platteau), and to take the part of the poor by working with their protectors in political society.37 More likely, he would urge the development community to leave alone. It is for poorer people to improve their lives through democratic struggle. For all its considerable insights, however, there are lacunae in Chatterjees work. One such absence concerns the economy. Chatterjee is centrally concerned with how poorer people have to make their way in the world. He is enormously attentive to their dealings with states that have been governmentalized and which are approached through, and partly constituted in, political society. He has also written extensively about the passive revolution in India, and thus by extension on the so-called Hindu rate of growth that took hold from c. 1965 to 1980. What Chatterjee has not taken on board is the upturn in Indias economic fortunes since about 1980. Through the 1980s and 1990s the Indian economy grew at an average annual rate of nearly 4 per cent,
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adjusted for population growth. This has led to profound debates on the causes of the upturn, on whether, and if so why, the upturn predated the reforms of 1991 (as it seems to have done) and, crucially, on the poverty-reducing effects of a higher sustained rate of economic growth.38 This is not the place to review these debates in detail. Suffice it to say that, while there is little support in the academic community for the Government of Indias claim that the rate of absolute poverty fell from 36 per cent in 1993 4 to 26 per cent in 1999 2000, it is clear that headcount rates of poverty have fallen since 1980 by as much as 15 or 20 percentage points.39 The point I wish to make here, however, is that Chatterjee, to the best of my knowledge, has chosen not to intervene in these debates or to take them on board in his recent writings. And this is not because Chatterjee thinks that political economy issues can be safely left to economists. The topic of his fourth Leonard Hastings Schiff Memorial Lecture in 2001 was globalization and the (in)stability of international financial and capital markets.40 When it comes to the reform period in India, however, there is a hesitation to write of neoliberalism except in terms of its unscrupulous gestures in respect of civil society. The partiality and the sequencing of the reform process in India (which has been very far from a textbook case of neoliberalism in action) have been largely ignored, and with them the key question of the relationship between economic growth and poverty alleviation. To put it another way, Chatterjee is focused on the daily lives of the governed. He is hugely insightful on the matter of their disempowerment, at least in respect of civil society and basic human rights. What is silenced is the relationship over time of different groups of poor people to changing rates and processes of economic accumulation, both in regard to macroeconomic policy and through the changing construction of labour markets. Again, this is not a matter of endorsing official rhetoric about shining India, outsourced India or any other Panglossian view of the Indian economy. Barbara Harriss-White and Jan Breman are just two of many engaged scholars who continue to paint a dark picture of the lives of Indias labouring poor.41 My point is that the very legitimate criticisms that Chatterjee and other subalternists can make of one part of development studies (the good governance agenda) are rarely complemented by serious attention to another range of issues that are also at the heart of that discipline. The post-colonial turn collapses around the cultural and in some respects the local. It is sometimes poorly placed to understand how state formations that took shape after Independence are now being renegotiated (liberalized), with effects that need careful documentation and analysis. A second criticism can be linked to this. At the heart of Chatterjees version of the impossibility theorem there is another stark distinction: not, this time, between governmentality and the economy, but between political society and civil society. Chatterjees argument presents serious problems for development theory and policy to the extent that his diagnosis of the thinness of civil society in most of the world runs true. This distinction reaches back to another that
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has run consistently through Chatterjees work and that of Sudipta Kaviraj: the distinction between the lifeworlds of Indias English-speaking elites and the vernacular lifeworlds of the masses. As many anthropologists have reported, ordinary people in India can find themselves alienated from the official languages of state: the languages that are written into the Constitution and those which reached a dizzying level of technocratic Otherness in the countrys five year plans.42 When push came to shove, however, as Chatterjee and Kaviraj have both correctly noted, the rational/formal state in India relied for its ground-level force on a vast staff of street-level bureaucrats who were poorly paid and who thought mainly in terms of limited group moralities. The question is whether Chatterjee and Kaviraj have pushed too hard at the state of neighbourly incomprehension that Kaviraj notes of middle-class and subaltern discourse (1991: 53). The distinction is inattentive to the ways in which civil society in India is slowly being broadened in the incubators of both political society and the state idea (what Hansen calls the idea of the sublime state).43 In part, this has to do with the agencies of secularization that Andre Beteille has drawn attention to, and which seem to be neglected by Chatterjee: the effects of schooling and the media, of attending government hospitals or clinics and so on.44 It is through these institutions that all but the poorest people begin to understand the state as something other than an abstraction. Consider a widow who goes to the post office or Block Development Office in Jharkhand (eastern India) to collect her pension. She will expect to be kept waiting in a queuing system that privileges rank over rights. She will expect to be spoken to roughly by a state official. She might even expect to make a small payment to one or more official to get what should be hers by right. But she will also have legitimate expectations of the state. These do not extend to protection against male violence in the household and may not extend to the right to work on a government labour creation scheme (for example, the Employment Assurance Scheme). For help in these areas she must work with relatives or with brokers in political society. But on the pension she has a sense of her rights as a citizen, and she will sometimes express herself to a government official in terms of a language of rights or of civil society. In some states, too, as for example in Kerala and parts of West Bengal, she or another younger woman might have gained some experience of participating in village open meetings within the framework of decentralized local governance (Panchayati Raj). Certainly, many men will have gained these experiences.45 It is not my intention to suggest that civil society yet rivals political society as a site for the empowerment or protection of the poor in a country like India. But the oil and water metaphor is stretched too far by Chatterjee. Even if we equate civil society with a society of rights as opposed to a realm of free association, as Chatterjee appears to, there is growing evidence that, in India, civil society is deepening.46 Consider two developments that generally are not picked up in these discussions. I have already suggested that we get a sense of ourselves in relation to others from something as mundane as a queue. Rather more important, I suspect, but equally under-researched in development
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studies is the matter of complaining. The classic discussion in general terms remains Hirschmans (1970) account of Exit, Voice and Loyalty. But what do we know about complaining in more ethnographic terms? Who gets to complain to whom and when? For what reasons? What motivates the complaint? How are complaints dealt with? Recent work in rural eastern India suggests that the quality of the public education system is a key area for complaint.47 Children and their parents complain about missing teachers, bad teachers, the lack of books and toilets (especially for girls) and so on. In some cases they have joined school oversight committees to express their views. Some of these committees have been formed spontaneously by parents; most are at the invitation of government (the Village Education Committees of Bihar and Jharkhand). Many of these committees function badly. Parents complain of officials taking the side of parents. Many teachers complain about the lack of education of the parents approaching them. They see a crowd of lowly people and brush them off as best they can. Many teachers in West Bengal are key local members of the CPM and hope to escape accountability for this reason. But in some cases the complaints are loud and consistent. Some teachers do get fired (or beaten). Some schools are beginning to get repaired. Much more needs to be done, of course, and much of it with the help of key actors in political society. But it is through such activities and experiences that a sense of being a citizen is built up. To the extent that the Government of India can be persuaded to put significant resources (and parental voice) into the public education (or health) system, perhaps with help from foreign aid budgets, it will also create a series of sites where ordinary people might come to see the state in ways they have not done before. Again, what happens at the local level is intimately bound up with the design of technologies of rule at the national and state levels. Water is another area that has galvanized cultures of complaint, particularly in urban areas. Intricate machineries of complaint collection and registration have been set up by Metrowater, a state-sector water utility in Chennai with a publicly stated commitment to professionalism in service delivery. But these machineries are regularly disrupted at the field level by assistant and junior engineers, as Karen Coelho has so eloquently shown. People from the slums were universally portrayed [by the engineers] as rough or even rogue (Coelho 2004: 7). They were described as illiterate members of the public and largely resented as such. One field engineer told Coelho that [t]he goal should be: only if you pay your taxes and charges, you give a complaint. But here people say you are the government, you have to give us service. And the organization gives in to this (ibid.: 9). For the middle classes, in contrast, the shift towards making customers pay for water use has been associated with the development of a culture of complaint. The same also holds true around (land) phone lines. Complaining becomes routinized among sections of the paying public. For those who cannot pay and Coelho is certainly not proposing a direct-pay-for-water model complaints more often have to be presented collectively through the structures of political society.
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Finally, consider the case of the photocopier. The relationships that poorer people strike with agencies of the state how they see the state are mediated not only by technologies of rule (by being defined as a BPL, for example: a member of the Below Poverty Line population), but also, in some cases, by technologies of a seemingly more mundane sort. Rudolf Mrazek (2002) has written a remarkable book on technology and nationalism in the Netherlands East Indies. He looks at how identities get formed and re-shaped in relation to such things as shoes, road-building and the introduction of radios and radio stations.48 More directly relevant to my concerns here, however, is the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan (MKSS), a non-governmental organization in Rajasthan, India, that is helping many poor Indians re-think their sightings of the state. In the words of two of its leading figures, the MKSS has encouraged the people . . . to concretely perceive the links between their personal lives and the political processes of democratic functioning. They saw the links between the check dam and the debate over State allocations, the planning process, and the implementation machinery (Roy and Dey 2001: 5, emphases added).49 The MKSS facilitated these sightings in part by procuring photocopiers. Photocopying allows for a sighting of the state that is continuous and more or less permanent. The retrieval of information about government spending decisions does not depend on impromptu conversations or the memories of one or two individuals who have coaxed information from government officials. The MKSS also dramatized its quest for accountability by means of rural juries armed with little more than microphones and perhaps a video recorder, as well as by hunger strikes, dharnas (sit-ins) and such innovations as the Ghotala (scam) Rath Yatra (a play performed in a dharna tent) and the declaration of pakhand divas (hypocrisy day) and kala divas (black day), both of which led up to victory day when the Panchayat Raj rules were finally amended. Finally, the MKSS took steps to scale up its campaigns by joining forces with the National Campaign for the Peoples Right to Information (NCPRI) in New Delhi, and by working actively alongside committed politicians and journalists, including Kuldip Nayyar and Nikhil Chakravarty. By this means especially the grassroots campaigns of the MKSS were made to rub shoulders with demands for open government that were being raised in metropolitan areas, and which have come to focus on the fourth estate (the press and media) and the Supreme Court of India and various high courts. As Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph have recently shown, the supreme courts judicial activism . . . played a critical role in approximating a framework of lawfulness and predictability that has had some success in protecting citizens rights, limiting malfeasance and safeguarding environmental and other public goods (2001: 132).50 In all of these ways, civil society in Rajasthan has been deepened, just as it has been elsewhere in India and in other parts of most of the world. It has blossomed, moreover, in close relationship with the political societies that Chatterjee and some others would prefer to see as wholly distinct arenas.51
Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies The morality of critique
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Thus far I have discussed five versions of the impossibility theorem in terms of their specific accounts of the failings or contradictions, so-called, of development studies. We have looked at such matters as duo-economics versus mono-economics, development and post-development, and generalized versus limited moralities. But there is something else which glues together various critiques of development and development studies, and that is a commitment to a particular way of thinking critically, or of placing these failing and contradictions against the spotlight of a more perfect state of affairs. I want to conclude the main part of this essay with a brief exploration of the forms of critique that have been deployed in these battles. What is it about development policy (or studies) that so irks a number of contemporary critics? The answer to this question goes back to the presumed raison detre of development studies: its simultaneous attachments to difference and normalization. Consider how each of the impossibility theorems deals with this issue. The counter-revolution and post-developmentalism present a remarkably common front. Both are hostile to what they see as mainstream development theory and policy because these doctrines and practices must necessarily produce social and economic worlds that are wildly imperfect. They are either dirigiste and inefficient or they are resource-depleting, exploitative and at odds with truly human desires. The form of critique that is practised here imagines a world without contradiction a world of free and fair markets, a world of harmony in which real needs are met in a spirit of cooperation and experimentation and judges existing reality in relation to it. These judgements are bound to be negative. The great strength of this form of critique is that it demands that we imagine a better world. The charge of reformism to which it gives rise, however, is meaningful only to the extent that these better (indeed, best-case) worlds are achievable. But therein lies a problem. As many critics have pointed out, the critical edge of perfectibility doctrines like free-market economics, Marxism or post-developmentalism is blunted by the impossibility of the dreams of perfection on which they are based. In all too many cases these doctrines insofar as they have been put into play have led to appalling social consequences. The three remaining versions of an impossibility theorem are less committed to perfection and the forms of critique to which this idea gives rise. It can plausibly be argued that Platteau has placed himself in a tradition of critique which refuses to make judgements (at any rate, quick and easy judgements). As I said before, his arguments must be engaged empirically. The tradition of refusing judgement tends to be associated with positive economics, and with a defence of the status quo, but it is also common among anthropologists. Refusing to make overt judgements is often very difficult and can be commendable. Imagine a liberal anthropologist from the UK trying to make sense of organizations active on behalf of creationism or intelligent
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design in the USA. Straightforward descriptions of these groups (insofar as descriptions are ever straightforward) can be an effective way of representing difference and of allowing moral judgements to be made by the respondents themselves. A generous reading of Platteau might suggest this is what he is trying to do. His work validates the local knowledge systems that are wrapped up in limited group moralities. It asks development agencies to respect these forms of knowledge and not to waste time and effort seeking their amelioration. Proponents of the fourth and fifth impossibility theorems are at first glance harder to link to any one form of critique. This is because they mix a Leftist version of the anti-reformist critique (this is true of Ferguson and Harriss for sure, and probably also Chatterjee, no matter that he has moved some way from his Marxist roots) with more deconstructive forms of critique. Followers of Foucault tend to have an expansive conception of power and its effects. Their aim is not necessarily, or even, to suggest ways forward in the sense of concrete policy alternatives. It is rather to add to the foment of debate and to put into play new ways of thinking which might provide resources for some individuals or groups in the constant jockeying for power and position that promotes the (re)structuring of everyday life. Critique thus becomes an act of permanent revolution, or perhaps even a playful decentring of ideas and practices that are taken for granted. Some criticisms of the very idea (or discourse) of development fall into this category, if category it is. What also unites these forms of critique, however, is something like scorn for development policy interventions that fail to prioritize politics, the political or democratic struggles in political society. Here is the source of a common charge against the World Bank and other agencies and it is an important charge. It is vital that students of development are alert to the power effects of the different forms of governmentality that are put forward as development policy. John Harriss is right about the inadequacies of social capital theory.52 Ha-Joon Chang is also right to note that few rich countries developed on the basis of the good governance agendas that are so widely trumpeted today. Getting relative prices wrong worked to the advantage of many of them.53 Having said that, it is important that two further points are taken on board. First, there is no escape from governmentality or a world of policies. Development studies does not just look in on the worlds it seeks to describe; it helps to produce them. It does so, moreover, in the plural. One complaint that development practitioners might legitimately direct to members of the postdevelopmental or neoliberal communities is that they falsely homogenize a range of development initiatives under the heading of the development discourse. Another complaint that would apply to individuals like Esteva and Prakash (1997), and perhaps also to Escobar, is that they refuse to specify the costs of their proposals. There is an important ethical issue here. How legitimate is it to commend strategies of de-linking or spatial closure, say, or of
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returning to a culture of the soil, if the opportunity costs of these actions are not made clear to those who are expected to heed the call? By the same token, it can fairly be argued that the utopias of the Left or the Right communism or free-market capitalism carry less moral weight to the extent that their proponents refuse to consider the likely costs of these regimes, and of the social upheavals that would be required to get there (assuming the horizon is not ever receding).54 Second, good practical (indeed political) arguments can be made in favour of particular development policies that might seem reformist or hopelessly pragmatic by the light of the depoliticization thesis. It partly depends on how we think about political strategy and tactics. If we assume: (a) that the world is not perfect or perfectible, (b) that what is called development comes in many versions and (c) that pro-poor political coalitions are not easily built; and if we further assume that an actor wants to take the part of the poor in some way (wishes to judge), then it is not clear that reformist modes of engagement (or critique) are uncalled for. More positively, while we can agree with HarrissWhite that [d]evelopment policy needs rethinking as that set of political and institutional forces required to prevail against the obstacles to a democratically determined accountability (2003: 247), it is not obvious: (a) that this take us very far in generating specific policy initiatives that would address the problem of corruption, say, in West Bengal or Bihar, or of forcing governments to share information with poor people in such a way that their citizenship rights are genuinely deepened; or (b) that the formulation of policies that would address these issues would look radically different to some parts of the good governance agenda that have been put into play, and periodically reviewed and developed, by the Government of India or leading agencies from within the NGO and international development communities. There is a parallel here with what Max Weber had in mind when he spoke about the duties of a person who stands in the service of moral forces. As Mitchell Dean explains, Weber wanted to prosecute an analytics of government [that encourages] us to accept a sense of responsibility for the consequences and effects of thinking and acting in certain ways (1999: 36). That sense of responsibility would extend to raising inconvenient facts (ibid., citing Weber 1972: 147), and thus to critiquing the conventional techniques, practices and rationalities of government and self-government (ibid.: 37), but it would also extend to commending specific forms of government or self-government that would seek the empowerment of individuals and groups against specific states of domination (ibid.). It is this specificity, perhaps, that public policy-making ultimately teaches, and which calls for a less dramatic conception of politics than some academics feel comfortable with. It also confirms that development studies, in this case, is not exterior to the world it describes, but is constitutive of that world.
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Conclusion Development studies is not the only field of knowledge to have been placed under the microscope recently. There have been important and insightful investigations into the colonial origins of academic geography and anthropology.55 Nor is development studies alone in formulating policies for economic growth and poverty alleviation: applied economics serves much the same purpose in what Escobar calls the more economically accomplished countries. In other respects, however, development studies is a special case. Precisely because of its founding commitments to difference and sameness, and because of its alleged attachments to an ideology of developmentalism (Escobar), it attracts the attention of critics concerned about a widening number of alleged deficiencies. It stands accused of being too political (Lal) and of being an anti-politics machine (Ferguson); it also stands accused of being committed to a presentism in development policy-making (Platteau) that is radically at odds with the Otherness of the post-colonial condition (Chatterjee). Most of these critics would accept that academic disciplines or field of knowledge are always artificial in key respects, and are the products of particular historical circumstances and knowledge-power combinations. Nevertheless, calls for the dis-invention of geography or anthropology or economics are voiced less openly or regularly than are calls for the disinvention of development studies. The presumption is that geography, anthropology and economics can be reconstituted, if necessary, as pure disciplines, or as academic subjects that mix positive analysis with a critical normative stance. Development studies in contrast cannot escape the dirty worlds of practical policy-making which lend it a reason for being, and which render it impotent, apolitical or supportive of a series of interventions that disempower and even infantilize the poor. I have argued throughout this paper that it is of the utmost importance that development studies faces up to these criticisms. Compared to some other subjects there seems to be a reluctance for people within the discipline of development studies to examine the history and present condition of the forms of knowledge to which they might be committed (knowingly or otherwise). It might fairly be argued, in addition, that the moral responsibilities of critique or policy-making are especially acute in development studies, particularly when people from one part of the world are asking for changes in policy elsewhere. Work on the moral geographies of relationships between distant strangers is still in its infancy.56 At the same time, I have sought to argue three further points. First, development studies cannot reasonably be described as a unitary or unchanging set of theories or policy-making practices. To reduce development studies to a singular ideology of development is at once mistaken and misleading. Like all subjects, development studies has to respond to events and changes in intellectual fashion. It is absurd to suppose that most people in this
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field are committed to the sort of developmentalism that once characterized the work of Walt Rostow or Arthur Lewis. Second, it is clear that some of the key intellectual issues of our time why, for example, the growth trajectories of East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have diverged so markedly since the 1950s; whether geography matters more than institutions in explaining this divergence; why some states fail and others do not; how and why globalization might be linked to changing patterns of poverty and inequality at different spatial scales; whether economic development depletes stocks of natural capital fall quite naturally into the field of development studies.57 These issues need to be studied comparatively but also with proper respect for the differences that place makes (that is, for the legacies of geography and history). The transcendental claims of market economics and extreme communitarianism are refused in mainstream development studies. Lastly, the world of policy-making cannot be escaped. It is not inconsistent to argue strongly for the re-politicization of development studies (in the senses intended by Ferguson, Harriss and Chatterjee) while also directing attention to the politics of policy-making and governmentality. The good governance agenda, for example, has been described as sickly, vacuous and apolitical, and it can be all of these things.58 To the man or woman with no land, however, and no expectation of land reform, it is better than nothing, especially if it increases voice or accountability or the better delivery of an entitlement. Not all political battles can be fought in the open or on the high ground, nor should we discount the slow-burning or recruitment effects of ideas and policies that expand the public sphere or civil society. Being able to complain effectively is not as glamorous as taking part in a revolution, but in some cases it can count for a great deal. It is a sign of the growing maturity of development studies that this point is widely accepted.
Notes
1 This paper was rst presented as an invited lecture to the September 2005 annual conference of the UKs Development Studies Association. Although it has been adapted for publication, parts of the article betray their origins as spoken text. I am grateful to the DSA for the invitation, and to John Harriss, Barbara Harriss-White, Craig Jeffrey, Giles Mohan, Richard Palmer-Jones, Uma Kothari, Satish Kumar, Vicky Lawson, David Smith and Manoj Srivastava for their comments and questions. I am also grateful to Maxine Molyneux for her support. 2 A hard version of the similarity principle would involve something like the processes of Americanization or Westernization set out by modernization theorists in the 1950s; weaker and more contemporary versions might propose models of late-industrialization or growth-enhancing governance, including those associated with East Asia. 3 Given this denition, many of the arguments in this paper will not apply to critical development studies, or that enterprise which uncouples the critical and applied parts of the subject. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that critical development studies is innocent in policy terms: to the extent that it is ercely critical of
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development or capitalism or globalization it is bound to suggest forms of counterpolitics and policy-making that should be subject to close scrutiny (see also the sixth section, The morality of critique). 4 See the next section, Impossibility theorems; see also Edwards (1989), Esteva (1992), Hall (1992), Mohanty (1988), Parpart (1993), Power (2002), Rist (1997), Slater (1992), Bauer (1991) and Krueger (1974). 5 Haberler (1987). 6 See Escobar (1995, including back cover blurb by Ashis Nandy); on de-linking, see Esteva and Prakash (1997). 7 The outstanding essay on this is still that by Pletsch (1981), but see also Nils Gilmans (2003) wonderful account of modernization theory in Cold War America; see too the essays in Cooper and Packard (1997). On the post-Cold War era, see Simon (1999). 8 See Rose (1999) and Dean (1999). For a discussion of technologies of rule in the context of the states war on poverty in eastern India, see Corbridge et al . (2005). For Nigeria, see Watts (2003). 9 I do not discuss the claim that development studies is not an academic discipline, although this argument is often made in the UK to justify its status (mainly) as a postgraduate degree programme one suitable to people who have already been trained in economics, political science, sociology or some other subject with a core body of theory. 10 Cowen and Shenton (1996: 61). The distinction refers to immanent process versus intended practice. Even if there was no development industry there would be development in the sense of social, economic and political changes that induce a sense of dislocation or unease, and which need some form of state-sponsored amelioration. 11 Gandhi (1997 [1908]), Schumacher (1970), Baran (1973 [1957]) and Frank (1967). Clearly, there are other impossibility theorems than the ones discussed here: the critique of development from the perspective of deep ecology is one obvious example. 12 Friedman (1957) and Bauer (1974). 13 Bauer (1954, 1976), Krueger (1974) and Johnson (1972). 14 For the impasse debate, see Booth (1985), Schuurman (1993). 15 Said (1978: 28), quoting Raymond Williams (1958: 376). By universals, he had in mind ideas of justice and human rights in the struggles of the Palestinians and other dominated groups (Said 1992 [1979]). 16 Escobar published signicant papers between 1984 and 1995, of course: see especially Escobar (1988, 1991). 17 For a discussion of high modernist versions of development, see Scott (1998). 18 Chambers (1983, 1997) and Uphoff (1996). 19 Uvin (1998) and de Waal (1997, 2005 [1989]). 20 Putnam et al . (1993) and Putnam (1995); see also Woolcock (1998). 21 See Mosse (2001); see also Kumar and Corbridge (2002). 22 See Bhagwati (1993) and Krueger (2002), and compare Chandresekhar and Ghosh (2002). For an overview, see Harriss and Corbridge (2003). 23 The best review remains that by White (1996). 24 North (1990), Rodrik (2006), Sen (2000) and Stiglitz (2003). See also Gray (2000) and of course Polanyi (2001 [1944]). For a more considered review of the history of development economics, see Meier (2004). 25 Sachs now visits the countries that he advises armed with a checklist of questions on such things as the extent of extreme poverty, economic policy, the scal framework, cultural barriers to economic development, patterns of governance, geopolitics and physical geography and human ecology. An example of a checklist is given on p. 84 of Sachs book, in the middle of his discussion of clinical economics. We are given to
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suppose that most governments or visiting economists fail to make checklists of this sort. 26 Corbridge (1998), Kiely (1999) and Pieterse (2000). Compare Nandy (2003) and Sylvester (1999). 27 Notably, Lewis (1955) and Rostow (1960). 28 The gure for China in 1950 is not robust. We know, however, that life expectancy at birth in China in 1960 was about 47; this gure rose to 70 by 1999. The corresponding gures for India are 44 and 63 over the same period of thirty-nine years. For discussion, see Dreze and Sen (2002): 114 15). Appallingly, the median age of ` death in sub-Saharan Africa in the early-1990s was just under 5 years (see Sen in Farmer 2003). 29 Lehmann (1997). 30 Compare with Bayart et al . (1999), Chabol and Daloz (1999), Cooper (2002) and Mamdani (1996). 31 Moore (1994). 32 Chatterjee has also long been a member of the subaltern studies collective of historians and social scientists. 33 On Nehru, see Zachariah (2004). Gandhi also had particular ideas on what it was to be Indian: see Alter (2000). 34 This was also the thesis, in large part, of Barrington Moore Jr (1966); see also Bardhan (1984) and Corbridge and Harriss (2000). 35 Hansen (2002). 36 Chief Ministers at various points since 1990 in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh respectively. DaMatta, signicantly, refers to the existence [in Brazil of a] . . . double code with respect to the relative importance of equality and hierarchy (1991 [1978]: 168). 37 This raises important questions, of course, about which groups one might work with, and why. Is the proposal that the CPI-M and Shiv Sena be dealt with on an equal basis? If not, why not? How civil should political society be? 38 For key contributions, see Dollar and Kray (2002) and Gupta (1998). 39 A large part of the decline in the all-India headcount ratios from 1993 4 to 1999 2000 seems to have been caused by changes in the way that ofcial estimates were made between the 50th and 55th rounds of the National Sample Survey. On this, see Deaton and Dreze (2002). Poverty declines in the 1980s were substantial and had to do with ` government anti-poverty programmes and, more importantly, with labour market tightening following the spread of Green Revolution technologies from coastal areas and the north west. 40 These lectures comprise the main part of the text of The Politics of the Governed . They were given in New York in November 2001. 41 Harriss-White (2003) and Breman (2004). 42 For discussion, see Chatterjee (1997a, 1997b), Kaviraj (1991) and Inden (1995). See also the essays in Fuller and Bene (2001). 43 Hansen (2001: 35) distinguishes between an imagination of the state split into sublime and profane dimensions. 44 Beteille (1999). 45 See Chaudhuri and Heller (2002) and Corbridge (2004). More generally, and in cautionary terms, see Mohan and Stokke (2000). 46 For further discussion, see Chandhoke (2003) and Jayal (1999). 47 Corbridge et al . (2005). See also Bhattacharya (1999) and Deverajan and Shah (2004). 48 There are echoes here of Fanons (1965) discussion of the Voice of Algeria. 49 For further discussion, see Jenkins and Goetz (1999). See also Farrington et al . (2003).
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50 It should be noted that Rudolph and Rudolph are fully aware of the enormous backlog of cases facing the court system in India at the highest levels (765,426 cases in the Allahabad High Court alone in 1995: Rudolph and Rudolph 2001: 137), and of the fact that judicial activism has often been in response to pressures that rst emerged in civil society, and with environmental and human rights activists in particular (as in the cases of opposition to environmental degradation and big dams (Narmada, Tehri), [and] child and bonded labor and demands for Dalit (ex-untouchable) empowerment, and historical and cultural preservation: ibid.: 137). 51 This paragraph and the preceding one draw from Corbridge et al . (2005: ch. 7). The next section, The morality of critique, also draws on and partly develops arguments made there in chapter 9. While Glyn, Manoj and Rene are implicated in these specic arguments, they bear no responsibility for the broader arguments of this paper. 52 Not only is social capital difcult to measure, but it is unclear why it should be made the independent variable in the World Banks model. Many scholars think that Putnam has causality back to front, or at the very least that social capital is one part of a broader loop of interactive processes. See Tarrow (1996). 53 Chang (2002). See also Wade (1990) and Khan (2005). Mushtaq Khan draws a useful distinction between market-enhancing and growth-enhancing good governance agendas. 54 It is a logical error to suppose that a form of critique that shows that capitalism is associated with negative outcomes a, b and c (say unemployment, pollution and inequality) is in itself an argument for socialism or something that is not capitalism. That argument would need to show that the alternative is not also associated with a, b or c and/or is not damaged by negative outcomes d, e, f and g. 55 Livingstone (1992), Driver (2000) and Kuper (1996). 56 Corbridge (1993) and Smith (2000). 57 Important recent contributions have come from Dasgupta (2001), Firebaugh (2003), Kohli (2004), Rodrik (2006), Rodrik et al . (2004), Sachs et al . (2001), Stern et al . (2005), Wade (2004) and Wolf 2005 [2004], among others. 58 Jenkins (2002) and Leftwich (1993). But see also Tendler (1997).
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Stuart Corbridge is Professor of Development Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before that he taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Miami and Syracuse. His most recent book, with Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava and Rene Veron, is Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India (Cambridge, 2005). He is now working on a history of development thought.

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Economy and Society

The (im)possibility of development studies

Online Publication Date: 01 May 2007

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Economy and Society Volume 36 Number 2 May 2007: 179 211

The (im)possibility of development studies

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Economy and Society

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Economy and Society

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Economy and Society

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Economy and Society

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Economy and Society

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Economy and Society

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Economy and Society

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Economy and Society

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Economy and Society

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies

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Economy and Society

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Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies The morality of critique

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Economy and Society

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Economy and Society

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Economy and Society

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Economy and Society

Downloaded By: [University Of Melbourne] At: 00:36 24 June 2009

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies