Dr. Eyene Okpanachi
What is ‘development’? Development for whom, and for what purpose? Who really benefits from development, and at what cost to others? The topic of development as an aspiration, an ideology, and an academic field of study became particularly significant in the post-World War II era.
The debate has revolved around disagreements about what actually constitutes development, whether economic growth, gender parity, racial equality, income equality, or happiness. Scholars have also asked whether development is an end in itself or a means to an end, and if the latter, what that end should be and how it can be achieved. Other considerations include who and what is responsible for underdevelopment, and what roles historical legacies of colonial subjugation and new forms of control play in explaining the underdevelopment of certain countries, especially in non-Western countries, or the Global South.
The postwar interest in the academic study of development was largely influenced by the US commitment to “embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas” (Rist, 2006: 71). This concept of development was further given an ideological and instrumental meaning in the context of the newly-independent countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, and also the changing international dynamics that US Defence Secretary Robert MacNamara characterized as “the threat of communist subversion” in the West in general and the US in particular during the Cold War era (cf. Bernstein, 1971: 143). The general foundation for this line of thought was modernization theory, which essentially referred to the grand vision that changes in newly-independent states would be modeled after the development pathway that the West had already pioneered (Smith, 1997).
Modernization theory was framed around the concept of “political development,” a general trend towards democracy including pluralism and competitiveness, stability and nation-building, or nationalism and national integration. Later on, modernization theory was reformulated in light of criticisms and practical developments such as military coups, sectarian conflicts, and authoritarian one-party rule, which revealed that the optimistic assumptions about the direction and possibilities of development were simplistic or even erroneous. With the reversibility of political development in mind, there was a need to deal with the problem of “political decay.” Samuel Huntington argued in Political Development and Political Decay (1965) that the rates of “organization and institutionalization” of political development had not kept pace with the increasing “rates of mobilization and participation” in Asian, African, and Latin American societies, and that this asymmetry “undermine(s) political institutions.” Huntington (1968) effectively redefined “political development” as the capacity of the state to enforce order irrespective of the form of government, whether democratic or autocratic. However, his theory did not clearly depart from the main assumptions of modernization.
A more critical objection to modernization theory arises from dependency theory, which fundamentally questions the assumption of modernization theory that Western influences in postcolonial states would lead to progress in these countries. André Gunder Frank argued that underdevelopment in the periphery went hand in hand with the development of capitalism itself (1969: 9). But even within this broad theory, there are differences. For instance, the structuralist dependency approach of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Enzo Faletto, Peter Evans, Osvaldo Sunkel and Maria da Conceição Tavares rejected the pessimistic prognosis of underdevelopment in Latin American countries. Citing the modest industrialization in Brazil in the 1960s, Cardoso argued that the relationship between Latin American countries and Western capitalist countries still provided the former with a certain latitude to operate and achieve some form of partial development or “associated dependent development” (Kay, 2011).
In spite of their differences, modernization and dependency theories share several characteristics. Both assume that development, even progress, is the normal condition of historical change. Both theories measure development purely in terms of economic growth, while other non-economic issues such as race and gender are, at best, by-products of economic development. Both also assume a state-driven path to progress.
The weaknesses of these theories led to the emergence of new perspectives on development. One set of perspectives paid attention to gender: Women and Development (WAD), Women in Development (WID), and Gender and Development (GAD). These perspectives, known as “alternative development” (Pieterse, 1998), emphasized human or “people-centered” development, including empowerment/participation, environmental protection, identity, and equity or freedom, unlike previous approaches that focused primarily on economic and national growth. However, although these models initially presented critical challenges to mainstream development, some of their key elements were over time “absorbed into mainstream development” to the point that these “alternative development” models became “less distinct from the conventional development discourse and practices” (Pieterse, 1998: 344). Therefore, only the emergence of critical development theory that built on post-structural and postmodernist thinking could provide a clear challenge to, and a fundamental critique of, mainstream development theories.
Critical Development Theory (CDT) borrows from the works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. It rejects the metanarratives of development as a universal project or as Western modernity, questions the claims of dominant Western development discourses of objective reality or scientific truth, and seeks to unravel the “pervasive character and functioning of development as a paradigm of self-definition” (Escobar, 1995: 21). Broadly speaking, CDT includes critical feminist theories, post-development theory, and postcolonial theory, drawing attention to the social construction of gender relations, racial silences, and the intersectionality of race and gender with the local, national, and global structures of power and inequity.
Post-development theories associate the discourse and practice of development with a Western hegemonic project whose vision of progress and of development as a “magic formula” (Escobar, 1995: vii), has failed, leading to an “impasse” in development (Schuurman, 2004) and making it “a poisonous gift to the populations it set out to help” (Rahnema, 1997: 381). Criticism of post-development theory has included its preoccupation with “resistance rather than emancipation” (Pieterse, 1998: 361), its deconstruction of development without offering any constructive alternative, its romanticization of local traditions while ignoring or overlooking the fact that not everything indigenous is good (Pieterse, 1998), and its ignorance of the positive aspects of modernization (Pieterse, 1998). However, I think that some of these criticisms are unfounded. Although some post-development theorists do not explicitly offer alternative visions of the world, questioning the very essence of development, exposing the absences and silences of development, and drawing attention to the plight of the marginalized and disempowered in the development process all provide an emancipatory potential. The ‘skeptical’ and ‘neopopulist’ strands of post-development theory may not explicitly offer alternative visions of the world, but have demonstrated “why development interventions do not work, and this must be kept separate from a call for alternatives” (Nustrad, 2001: 479).
In the same vein, postcolonial theory engages deeply “with the role of power in the formation of identity and subjectivity and the relationship between knowledge and political practices” (Abrahamsen, 2003: 197). However, unlike post-development theory, which projects a binary notion of power with the “West” dominating the “Third World” (Ziai, 2004), postcolonial theory recognizes different colonial spaces and experiences, sees power as “pervasive yet fractured” (Kapoor, 2004: 656), draws attention to how the “West” and “Third World” co-create each other, and how “the colonial process restructured colonial powers too and the memory banks and histories are twinned and interpenetrated” (Sylvestre, 1999: 712). Moreover, postcolonial theory uses the concept of hybridity to challenge binaries, such as “oppressor” and “oppressed,” that are often seen in post-development theory. Hybridity disrupts colonial discourses of power and dislocates the domains of authentic or pure identity upon which the colonial authority relies to appropriate power (Bhabha, 1994: 2). The concept of the subaltern (Abrahamseen, 2007) is intimately linked to hybridity’s emphasis on agency and resistance. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1994), Spivak drew attention to the problem of how the investigation of marginalized groups in the global South, or the subaltern, based on “universal” concepts and frameworks leads to lack of representation and to the exclusion of their voices. Spivak therefore argues that, given this “violence of imperialist epistemic, social, and disciplinary inscription” (1994: 80), the “subaltern cannot speak” (104). However, in spite of this subjugation, Spivak imagines that the subaltern can still transcend their obstacles if the postcolonial critic can disrupt hegemonic western discourses by rethinking and retelling colonial historiography, which emphasizes the agency of the subaltern in struggles against colonial occupation.
However, some critics, such as Dirlik (1994), have claimed that postcolonial theory does not account for “the world outside of the subject” (336), especially the issue of exclusion of postcolonial states arising from neoliberalism. Postcolonial theory must navigate this weakness by using insights from dependency theory to mount a more powerful challenge to neoliberalism.
A key issue in the postcolonial debate is the involvement of China in the development of other Global South countries, providing alternative financing for development in these countries through aid provision, technical assistance, infrastructural investment, trade, and peacekeeping. Some suggest that China’s involvement in these countries, in particular African countries, is much like Africa’s engagements with Western countries: another form of colonialism, a “‘new scramble’ for the continent’s natural resources” (Marton & Matura, 2011: 157); or a “neo-colonial’ engagement (Bräutigam and Xiaoyang, 2011: 28) that has benefited China only, to the detriment of Africa and its peoples.
However, as Six (2009: 1109) has reminded us, even though some of these criticisms are informed by genuine concern about the developmental effects of these engagements, “the underlying motives of the critique of China” by “governments, political decision makers and international institutions” that themselves have a “distinct history of exploitative and authoritarian ‘partnerships’ with the South” is questionable. At best, “the critique of Chinese and other new donors’ policies in Africa and other Global South regions suffers in many cases from the same ahistorical character as the development discourse” that projects the West as the only “administrator of universal values” and the emancipator of the “Third World.” Such criticism is further rooted in Western businesses’ frustration that China has priced them out of the market (Naím, 2007).
The controversy over China’s role in the development of the Global South is perhaps best demonstrated by the discourse of its intervention projects via the One Belt, One Road Initiative, also known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI is an ambitious trillion-dollar infrastructural plan originally aimed at connecting developing and emerging countries, though the original plan has been expanded to include countries in Africa and Latin America. As part of this initiative, Chinese loans are used to build infrastructures that would connect these countries to China along six economic corridors, including ports, railways, highways, and pipelines. China’s political-economic diplomacy through infrastructural development is driven by its desire to become the global trade centre and to strengthen its geopolitical powers (Ching, 2018). This program is also spurred by the strategic development of transportation infrastructures that would enable China to bypass potential disruptions to its oil import stemming from the insecurity around, and the contested nature of, the Straits of Malacca, one of the world’s most crucial oil transit ‘choke points,’ which connects the China Sea with the Indian Ocean and which has served as China’s major trading sea route. However, although China insists that its development intervention is a “win-win strategy” under which development opportunities are shared with other countries (Xinhua News, 2017), critics have accused China of using cheap loans to poor nations in order to enhance its own economic power at those countries’ expense, and of creating a new version of colonialism or economic imperialism similar to the development strategies of some countries of the Global North. These investments have indeed engendered development, as various countries have improved their infrastructures and built new ones under the BRI. Yet, the realization that these loans could bankrupt poor countries and further their indebtedness to wealthier ones, as demonstrated with China’s takeover of a Sri Lankan port built with Chinese funds over failure to repay the debt, has triggered backlash in some of these countries. For example, in October 2018, Sierra Leone’s President Julius Maada Bio cancelled a proposed $138 million airport project that had been funded with Chinese loans. Beyond fears of unsustainable debt, opposition to the BRI has also come from Western countries who fear, as Henry Kissinger stated before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in January 2018, that the Initiative “is a quest to shift the world’s center of gravity.” Kissinger’s opinion was given more formal validation by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, “outlining economic and security threats to the United States and its allies and partners beyond China’s immediate maritime periphery” (U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 2018: 11-12).
What can we conclude about development and the global south from this discussion? ‘Development’ can be regarded as deeply contested due to the central roles of normative values and approaches that hinge on an ontology of difference, epistemological scepticism, and a methodology that doubts claims of the existence of absolute knowledge and complete truth and prioritizes the need to undermine these metanarratives and their totalitarian effects in other to draw “attention to otherwise marginalized ‘others’” (Hay, 2002: 227). What is valuable in this contested discourse is that the criticisms of ‘mainstream’ understanding of development as it applies to the Global South can also apply to the erasures and silences of marginalized groups and people within the Global North. Finally, the debates over China’s role in development and examinations of China’s BRI illustrate that, despite its support of infrastructural development in some countries, the BRI has also elicited serious concerns and criticism, particularly concerns of potential debt traps and of potential threats to regional power balances and/or to democratic values. China’s role in international development and the resistance it is generating not only point to the power struggles between countries in the Global North and Global South, but also speak to the diversity of interest within the broad category of the ‘Global South’ and the agency within each Global South country. These complex and variegated responses show that both the discourses and the practices of development are and will remain contested issues.
By: Dr. Eyene Okpanachi is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria. Contact him at eyeneokpanachi@uvic.ca
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