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THINKING BEYOND DEVELOPMENT: the FUTURE of POST-DEVELOPMENT THEORY in SOUTHERN AFRICA Stefan Andreasson School of Politics

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THINKING BEYOND DEVELOPMENT: the FUTURE of POST-DEVELOPMENT THEORY in SOUTHERN AFRICA Stefan Andreasson School of Politics THINKING BEYOND DEVELOPMENT: THE FUTURE OF POST-DEVELOPMENT THEORY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA Stefan Andreasson School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy Queen’s University Belfast United Kingdom [email protected] DRAFT PAPER Prepared for the British International Studies Association annual conference University of Cambridge, 17-19 December 2007 Abstract: This paper examines how post-development theory can inform current debates on development and the search for alternatives to the post-WWII development paradigm. With few exceptions, global economic growth and increasing exploitation of human and natural environments for profit has not produced broad-based socioeconomic development in post-colonial societies that is any way sustainable. The paper begins by outlining central tenets of post-development theory, how they have been rejected and marginalized by critics in the development community, and the difficulty of translating the post-development idea of moving away from development based on ever-increasing growth, accumulation and consumption into actual politics and policy. This is however an urgent task: what is perceived as the great failure of Africa to live up to its post-independence challenge in terms of development and emancipation has resulted in a debilitating ‘Afro-pessimism’ in both scholarly and popular commentaries on the continent. As externally imposed solutions to underdevelopment in Africa have for a variety of reasons been considered failures, post-development theory constitutes a conceptual and theoretical vessel through which new solutions for improving well-being, as well as coping with the pressures of globalization in African societies, can emerge. The paper continues by considering how the Southern African value system ubuntu can serve as a central concept around which to organize a debate on how to move ‘beyond development’. Moving beyond the confines of orthodox development requires a genuinely communal effort to re-imagine and reinvent goals and aspirations for a better future, as well as finding a resolution to the two key forms of alienation experienced as a result of the modern drive to develop: the alienation of man from nature and the alienation of human beings from each other. Finally the paper considers how post-development theory could form the basis for a greater ‘South-South’ dialogue on alternatives to the modern development paradigm. [O]ur society has been captured by a rapacious individualism which is corroding our social cohesion, which is repudiating the value and practice of human solidarity, and which totally rejects the fundamental precept of Ubuntu. – Thabo Mbeki We believe that in the long run the special contribution to the world by Africa will be in the field of human relationships. – Steve Biko A modern predicament Speaking at the eighth annual Steve Biko Memorial Lecture in Cape Town in September 2007, South African’s President Mbeki provided a sombre and rather frank assessment of disturbing levels of fragmentation and dysfunction in post-apartheid society. According to Mbeki, the problem of ‘rapacious and venal individualism’ – which the neo-liberal policies of his government have been accused of exacerbating (e.g., Bond 2000; Marais 2001) – will only be resolved by a rediscovery of ‘African identity’ and the building of a society that is ‘new not only in its economic arrangements, but also in terms of the values it upholds’, namely the ‘Ubuntu value system’ (Mbeki 2007: 16-17).1 The notion that development entails more than socio- economic and technological (i.e., material) change is thus keenly felt and recognized at the highest level of political office. The sentiments expressed by President Mbeki and Steve Biko, the founder of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement who was beaten to death by police during interrogation in 1977, suggest an established mode of thinking which holds that the way in which South Africa has developed, indeed the way in which it has become Africa’s most Westernized and modern state, has produced serious social ills that impede genuine development of human potential and emancipation (anchored in African values and tradition). Most obvious among these ills are murder and sexual violence rates that are among the highest in the world and the world’s greatest number of people suffering from HIV/AIDS. These criminal and health crises are both a cause and consequence of a deteriorating societal fabric, as much as a result of 1 underdevelopment.2 Nevertheless, prominent (and therefore influential) debates on how to pursue development in Southern Africa tend to leave questions regarding culture, identity, individualism, community and belonging aside, in favour of paying attention to more easily measurable (and conceivable) issues, such as how to promote economic growth, greater economic redistribution and the political means by which access to the productive output of the region’s economies can be broadened. Across the ideological spectrum, from radical and socialist to liberal and conservative, the key debate on Southern Africa’s future revolves around the question of how, given the region’s difficult socio-economic circumstances and a highly competitive and rather unforgiving global economy, development can most effectively be pursued. Regional particularities, such as the need to pursue development within the framework of a National Democratic Revolution and Black Economic Empowerment in South Africa, the politics of ‘indigenization’ alongside state-society breakdown in Zimbabwe and an urgent need to promote development with diversification in Botswana, provide debates on development in each country with their own distinct character. Still, the debate is first and foremost about how regional productive capabilities can be enhanced and harnessed more efficiently, so that the region’s overwhelmingly poor inhabitants can increase their consumption and improve their well-being (e.g., Lee 2003; Hentz 2005; Taylor 2007). This is seen as particularly urgent in the context of increasing hardships associated with the strictures of structural adjustment policies (whether externally ‘imposed’ or home-grown), limited success with broadening the benefits of economic growth and the devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic. In its most basic, and powerful, manifestation Southern Africa’s debate on development remains safely anchored in the orthodox conceptualization of development predicated on ever-increasing (economic) growth, accumulation and consumption that has defined both liberal and socialist paradigms since the industrial revolution and which, since the end of WWII and the onset of the Cold War, has constituted the ‘era of development’ (cf. Rist 2002).3 Given the very urgent material needs of Southern Africa’s inhabitants – ranging most obviously from access to adequate nutrition and medical care to decent housing, education and employment – it is not surprising that scholarly critique of fundamental problems inherent in orthodox understandings and pursuits of development, in this 2 case post-development theory (to be outlined in the next section), has not featured prominently in African debates, either at the level of elite policy-making or in civil society (Matthews 2004). Instead, there exists a disturbing, counter-productive and therefore dangerous cognitive dissonance in debates on development in contemporary Africa. In its simplest form, this dissonance stems from the lack (or dismissal), among politicians, policy-makers and social commentators alike, of a sophisticated understanding of the particular historical, social, political and economic contexts in which development has successfully been pursued in the past, most notably in the West and later among East Asia’s so-called Tigers. Few, if any, of the important factors facilitating developmental states in East Asia: national and social cohesion, a favourable global strategic and economic environment and stable state-business-labour relations (Woo-Cumings 1999), are present in Southern Africa today – Botswana’s stable state-market-society relations, partially a consequence of a weak civil society, is the exception – suggesting that countries in the region do not, at present, possess the basic foundations on which development along the lines of the ‘developmental state’ can be built (Andreasson 2007). At a more fundamental level, there is little if any serious consideration given to the notion that even a ‘successful’ pursuit of an orthodox form of development, whether of state- interventionist or largely market-oriented kind, that produces a sustained trajectory of economic growth and increases in aggregate levels of production and consumption, may in fact exacerbate already disturbing levels of stress placed on social, environmental and cultural/spiritual dimensions of contemporary Southern African societies. Contributions of post-development theory to debates on development have been largely ignored by politicians and scholars alike in Southern Africa. Matthews (2004: 377) notes that no African scholar is linked prominently with the post-development school of thought; indeed, ‘the African situation has not featured prominently in discussions by [post-development] theorists’.4 However, given the argument to be put forth in this paper – that post-development theory identifies serious shortcomings and contradictions inherent in mainstream liberal and social democratic blueprints for development – it is useful to examine ways in which post-developmental thinking can contribute to more
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