2‘Post-development’ as concept and social practice Arturo Escobar In 1992, a collective volume edited by Wolfgang Sachs, The Development Dictionary, started by making the radical and controversial claim, ‘The last forty years can be called the age of development. This epoch is coming to an end. The time is ripe to write its obituary’ (Sachs 1992: 1). If development was dead, what would come after? Some started to talk about a ‘post-development era’ (Escobar 1991) in response to this question, and a second collective work, The Post-development Reader, launched the project of giving content to the notion of ‘post-development’ (Rahnema with Bawtree, 1997). According to the editors of this work, the word ‘post-development’ was first used at an international colloquium in Geneva in 1991. Six years later, it had caught up in the imagina- tion of critical scholars and practitioners in the development field. Reactions on all sides of the scholarly-political spectrum have continued since, resulting in a vibrant, albeit at times somewhat scattered, debate. This debate has brought together practitioners and academics from many social science disciplines and fields. To fully understand the emergence of the notion of post-development and how it has functioned in the international development debate, it is important to locate it briefly within the development studies field. Over the past 50 years, the conceptualization of development in the social sciences has seen three main moments, corresponding to three contrasting theoretical orientations: moderniza- tion theory in the 1950s and 1960s, with its allied theories of growth and devel- opment; dependency theory and related perspectives in the 1960s and 1970s; and critical approaches to development as a cultural discourse in the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s. Modernization theory inaugurated a period of certainty in the minds of many theorists and world elites, premised on the beneficial effects of capital, science and technology; this certainty suffered a first blow with dependency theory, which argued that the roots of underdevelopment were to be found in the con- nection between external dependence and internal exploitation, not in any alleged lack of capital, technology or modern values. For dependency theorists, the problem was not so much with development as with capitalism. In the 1980s, a growing number of cultural critics in many parts of the world questioned the very idea of development. They analysed development as a discourse of Western ‘Post-development’ as concept and social practice 19 origin that operated as a powerful mechanism for the cultural, social and eco- nomic production of the Third World (e.g. Apffel-Marglin and Marglin 1990; Ferguson 1991; Escobar 1995; Rist 1997). These three moments may be classi- fied according to the root paradigms from which they emerged: liberal, Marxist, and post-structuralist theories, respectively. Despite overlaps and more eclectic combinations than in the recent past, a main paradigm continues to inform most positions at present, making the dialogue difficult at times. Main elements of the post-structuralist critique Since the notion of post-development emerged directly from the post-structuralist critique, it is instructive to give a brief account of the main elements of this analysis. In keeping with the overall questioning of realist epistemologies of post-structuralism (see the work of Michel Foucault for the best statement on this theoretical tendency), the main thrust of the post-structuralist critique was not so much to propose yet another version of development – as if by progres- sively refining the concept theorists would finally arrive at a true and workable conception – but to question precisely the ways in which Asia, Africa and Latin America came to be defined as ‘under-developed’ and so in need of develop- ment. The question the post-structuralists asked was not then, ‘how can we do development better?’ but ‘why, through what historical processes, and with what consequences did Asia, Africa and Latin America come to be “invented” as “the Third World” through discourses and practices of development?’ The answer to this question included many elements, among which are the following: 1 As a historical discourse, ‘development’ emerged in the early post-Second World War period, even if its roots lie in deeper historical processes of modernity and capitalism. A reading of the texts and historical events of the period 1945–1960 in particular validated this observation. It was in this period that development ‘experts’ of all kinds started to land massively in Asia, Africa and Latin America, giving reality to the construct of the third world. 2 The development discourse made possible the creation of a vast institutional apparatus through which the discourse was deployed, that is, through which it became a real and effective social force, transforming the economic, social, cultural and political reality of the societies in question. This appar- atus included Bretton Woods institutions (e.g. World Bank and the IMF) and other international organizations (e.g. the UN system) as well as national planning and development agencies and local-level development projects. 3 The discourse of development can be said to have operated through two principal mechanisms: (a) the professionalization of development problems, which included the emergence of expert knowledges and fields to deal with every aspect of ‘under-development’ (including the field of development studies itself) and (b) the institutionalization of development, the vast 20 A. Escobar network of organizations already mentioned above. These processes made it possible to systematically link knowledge and practice through particular projects and interventions. Strategies such as ‘rural development’ for instance could be seen, from this perspective, as a systematic mechanism for linking expert knowledges of agriculture, food and so on with particular interventions (extension, credit, infrastructure, etc.) in ways that – even if appearing to be the ‘natural way of doing things’ – resulted in a profound transformation of the countryside and peasant societies of many parts of the Third World along the lines of modern capitalist conceptions of land, agri- culture, farming and so forth. 4 Finally, the post-structuralists’ analysis pointed at the forms of exclusion that went along with the development project, particularly the exclusion of the knowledges, voices and concerns of those whom, paradoxically, devel- opment was supposed to serve: the poor of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The idea of post-development It was these series of analyses, plus the observation of increasing discontent in many parts of the so-called Third World with development that led some theo- rists to suggest the idea of post-development. The deconstruction of develop- ment, in other words, led post-structuralists to postulate the possibility of a ‘post-development era’. For some, this generally meant an era in which develop- ment would no longer be the central organizing principle of social life (Escobar 1991, 1995) – one in which, to paraphrase a well-known paper of the period focused on the sub-field of women in development, development would not take place solely ‘under Western eyes’ (Mohanty 1991). Others added to this charac- terization a re-valorization of vernacular cultures, the need to rely less on expert knowledge and more on ordinary people’s attempts at constructing more humane and culturally and ecologically sustainable worlds, and the important point of taking seriously social movements and grassroots mobilizations as the basis for moving towards the new era (Shiva 1993; Rahnema with Bawtree 1997; Rist 1997; Esteva and Prakash 1999). In general, it can be said that post-development is not a new historical period to which its proponents believe we have arrived or that is within reach. As we will see shortly, this would mean falling into the trap of going back to a realist position (‘we know that the real truth is that we are in a post-development era’), which would be against the spirit of post-structuralism. To ascertain in more detail the differences between the post-structuralist and the more well-known modes of analysis (liberal and Marxist), it is instructive to review how they answer differently to a series of questions. The idea of post-development refers to the following: 1 The possibility of creating different discourses and representations that are not so mediated by the construct (ideologies, metaphors, language, premises, etc.) of development. ‘Post-development’ as concept and social practice 21 2 Therefore, the need to change the practices of knowing and doing and the ‘political economy of truth’ that defines the development regime. 3 Therefore, the need to multiply the centres and agents of knowledge produc- tion – in particular, to give salience to the forms of knowledge produced by those who are supposed to be the ‘objects’ of development so that they can become subjects of their own right. 4 Two particularly useful ways to do this are, first, by focusing on the adapta- tions, subversions and resistance that local peoples effect in relation to development interventions (as with the notion of counterwork explained in the following) and, second, by highlighting the alternative strategies pro- duced by social movements as they encounter development projects. In this way, it may be said for instance that the conceptualization of alternative development developed by the Proceso de Comunidades