Beyond the Search for a Paradigm? Post-Development and beyond
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Development. Copyright © 2000 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (200012) 43:4; 11–14; 016341.
Upfront
Beyond the Search for a Paradigm? PostDevelopment and beyond ARTURO ESCOBAR
ABSTRACT Arturo Escobar reviews the critiques around postmodernist critiques of development. He looks at the reading strategies employed and argues for a cultural politics of difference. KEYWORDS modernization, livelihoods, locality, poststructuralism
Unsettling development The status of development has become again difficult to ascertain. During the first decades of the development era, and despite an array of positions, there seemed to be clear agreement on the need for some sort of development. Modernization and dependency theories were the paradigms of the day. Littleby-little this consensus began to erode because of a number of factors, both social (the increasing inability of development to fulfill its promises, the rise of movements that questioned its very rationality) and intellectual (the availability of new tools of analysis, chiefly post-structuralism). In the 1990s, poststructuralist critiques succeeded in casting a serious doubt not only on the feasibility but on the very desirability of development. Going beyond most previous critiques, development was shown to be a pervasive cultural discourse with profound consequences for the production of social reality in the so-called Third World. The deconstruction of development by the poststructuralists resulted in the possibility of imagining a post-development era, one in which the centrality of development as an organizing principle of social life would no longer hold. In the second half of the 1990s, these analyses became themselves the object of poignant criticisms and rebuttals. Many of these works are directed against what is now described as ‘the post-development school’ or position. I do not want to suggest that this new set of works constitutes a unified position or even a trend.
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Development 43(4): Upfront However, in the limited space allowed, I want to treat them as a group by outlining what I consider to be the main concerns expressed by them, on the one hand, and what I believe is at the basis of these concerns, on the other. For the sake of brevity, I will also accept the identification of the ‘post-development school’ with three visible works, The Development Dictionary (Sachs ed, 1992), Encountering Development (Escobar, 1995), and The Post-development Reader (Rahnema and Bawtree eds, 1997). These volumes are singled out in several of the articles in question as the main texts on postdevelopment, although there are other authors added at times to this set (e.g. Rist, 1997; Vandana Shiva’s ‘ecofemism’, cf. Kiely, 1999).1
paradigm or yours’, to borrow Pieterse’s (1998) catchy title. It seems to me that it is possible to distinguish three main reading strategies on the part of the antipost-development writers.
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