Each essay in this now classic collection examines one key development concept, from the 'environment' to 'needs' and 'progress' to 'production'. Each concept is reviewed from a historical and anthropological point of view, with particular bias and intellectual flaws being highlighted. Overall, the authors argue that we must bid farewell to the whole idea of Eurocentric development in order to liberate people's minds in both North and South and to mobilize for bold responses to the environmental and ethical challenges now confronting humanity.
The result is an indispensable resource for scholars, practitioners, movements and students of development which invites us to recognize the tinted glasses we put on whenever we participate in the development discourse.
Each essay in this now classic collection examines one key development concept, from the 'environment' to 'needs' and 'progress' to 'production'. Each concept is reviewed from a historical and anthropological point of view, with particular bias and intellectual flaws being highlighted. Overall, the authors argue that we must bid farewell to the whole idea of Eurocentric development in order to liberate people's minds in both North and South and to mobilize for bold responses to the environmental and ethical challenges now confronting humanity.
The result is an indispensable resource for scholars, practitioners, movements and students of development which invites us to recognize the tinted glasses we put on whenever we participate in the development discourse.
The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power
352
The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power
352eBook
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Overview
Each essay in this now classic collection examines one key development concept, from the 'environment' to 'needs' and 'progress' to 'production'. Each concept is reviewed from a historical and anthropological point of view, with particular bias and intellectual flaws being highlighted. Overall, the authors argue that we must bid farewell to the whole idea of Eurocentric development in order to liberate people's minds in both North and South and to mobilize for bold responses to the environmental and ethical challenges now confronting humanity.
The result is an indispensable resource for scholars, practitioners, movements and students of development which invites us to recognize the tinted glasses we put on whenever we participate in the development discourse.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786997524 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2019 |
| Series: | Development Essentials |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 744 KB |
About the Author
Wolfgang Sachs is an author and research director at the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, in Germany. He has been chair of the board of Greenpeace Germany, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and is a member of the Club of Rome. Amongst the various appointments he has held are co-editor of the Society for International Development's journal Development; visiting professor of science, technology and society at Pennsylvania State University and fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies in Essen. He regularly teaches at Schumacher College and as Honorary Professor at the University of Kassel.
Wolfgang Sachs's first English book, For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires, was published by the University of California Press in 1992. Several of his works have been published by Zed Books. They include the immensely influential Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (edited, 1992), which has since been translated into numerous languages; Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict (edited, 1993); Greening the North: A Post-Industrial Blueprint for Ecology and Equity (co-authored with Reinhard Loske and Manfred Linz, 1998); Planet Dialectics: Explorations in Environment and Development (1999) and (with T. Santarius et al) Fair Future: Resource Conflicts, Security, and Global Justice (2007).
Read an Excerpt
The Development Dictionary
A Guide to Knowledge as Power
By Wolfgang Sachs
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2010 Wolfgang SachsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-381-5
CHAPTER 1
Development
GUSTAVO ESTEVA
To say 'yes', to approve, to accept, the Brazilians say 'no' – pois nao. But no one gets confused. By culturally rooting their speech, by playing with the words to make them speak in their contexts, the Brazilians enrich their conversation.
In saying 'development', however, most people are now saying the opposite of what they want to convey. Everyone gets confused. By using uncritically such a loaded word, and one doomed to extinction, they are transforming its agony into a chronic condition. From the unburied corpse of development, every kind of pest has started to spread. The time has come to unveil the secret of development and see it in all its conceptual starkness.
THE INVENTION OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT
At the end of World War II, the United States was a formidable and incessant productive machine, unprecedented in history. It was undisputedly at the centre of the world. It was the master. All the institutions created in those years recognized that fact: even the United Nations Charter echoed the United States Constitution.
But the Americans wanted something more. They needed to make entirely explicit their new position in the world. And they wanted to consolidate that hegemony and make it permanent. For these purposes, they conceived a political campaign on a global scale that clearly bore their seal. They even conceived an appropriate emblem to identify the campaign. And they carefully chose the opportunity to launch both – 20 January 1949. That very day, the day on which President Truman took office, a new era was opened for the world – the era of development.
We must embark [President Truman said] 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.
The old imperialism – exploitation for foreign profit – has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing.
By using for the first time in such context the word 'underdeveloped', Truman changed the meaning of development and created the emblem, a euphemism, used ever since to allude either discreetly or inadvertently to the era of American hegemony.
Never before had a word been universally accepted on the very day of its political coinage. A new perception of one's own self, and of the other, was suddenly created. Two hundred years of social construction of the historical–political meaning of the term 'development' were successfully usurped and transmogrified. A political and philosophical proposition of Marx, packaged American-style as a struggle against communism and at the service of the hegemonic design of the United States, succeeded in permeating both the popular and the intellectual mind for the rest of the century.
Underdevelopment began, then, on 20 January 1949. On that day, 2 billion people became underdeveloped. In a real sense, from that time on, they ceased being what they were, in all their diversity, and were transmogrified into an inverted mirror of others' reality: a mirror that belittles them and sends them off to the end of the queue, a mirror that defines their identity, which is really that of a heterogeneous and diverse majority, simply in the terms of a homogenizing and narrow minority.
Truman was not the first to use the word. Wilfred Benson, a former member of the Secretariat of the International Labour Organization, was probably the person who invented it when he referred to the 'underdeveloped areas' while writing on the economic basis for peace in 1942. But the expression found no further echo, either with the public or with the experts. Two years later. Rosenstein-Rodan continued to speak of 'economically backward areas'. Arthur Lewis, also in 1944, referred to the gap between the rich and the poor nations. Throughout the decade, the expression appeared occasionally in technical books or United Nations documents. But it only acquired relevance when Truman presented it as the emblem of his own policy. In this context, it took on an unsuspected colonizing virulence.
Since then, development has connoted at least one thing: to escape from the undignified condition called underdevelopment. When Nyerere proposed that development be the political mobilization of a people for attaining their own objectives, conscious as he was that it was madness to pursue the goals that others had set; when Rodolfo Stavenhagen proposes today ethno-development or development with self-confidence, conscious that we need to 'look within' and 'search for one's own culture' instead of using borrowed and foreign views; when Jimoh Omo-Fadaka suggests a development from the bottom up, conscious that all strategies based on a top-down design have 2 failed to reach their explicitly stated objectives; when Orlando Fals Borda and Anisur Rahman insist on participatory development, conscious of the exclusions made in the name of development; when Jun Nishikawa proposes an 'other' development for Japan, conscious that the current era is ending; when they and so many others qualify development and use the word with caveats and restrictions as if they were walking in a minefield, they do not seem to see the counterproductivity of their efforts. The minefield has already exploded.
In order for someone to conceive the possibility of escaping from a particular condition, it is necessary first to feel that one has fallen into that condition. For those who make up two-thirds of the world's population today, to think of development – of any kind of development – requires first the perception of themselves as underdeveloped, with the whole burden of connotations that this carries.
Today, for two-thirds of the peoples of the world, underdevelopment is a threat that has already been carried out; a life experience of subordination and of being led astray, of discrimination and subjugation. Given that precondition, the simple fact of associating with development one's own intention tends to annul the intention, to contradict it, to enslave it. It impedes thinking of one's own objectives, as Nyerere wanted; it undermines confidence in oneself and one's own culture, as Stavenhagen demands; it clamours for management from the top down, against which Jimoh rebelled; it converts participation into a manipulative trick to involve people in struggles for getting what the powerful want to impose on them, which was precisely what Fals Borda and Rahman wanted to avoid.
A METAPHOR AND ITS CONTORTED HISTORY
Development occupies the centre of an incredibly powerful semantic constellation. There is nothing in modern mentality comparable to it as a force guiding thought and behaviour. At the same time, very few words are as feeble, as fragile and as incapable of giving substance and meaning to thought and behaviour as this one.
In common parlance, development describes a process through which the potentialities of an object or organism are released, until it reaches its natural, complete, full-fledged form. Hence the metaphoric use of the term to explain the natural growth of plants and animals. Through this metaphor, it became possible to show the goal of development and, much later, its programme. The development or evolution of living beings, in biology, referred to the process through which organisms achieved their genetic potential: the natural form of the being pre-seen by the biologist. Development was frustrated whenever the plant or the animal failed to fulfil its genetic programme, or substituted for it another. In such cases of failure, 3 its growth was not development but rather an anomaly: pathological, and even anti-natural, behaviour. The study of these 'monsters' became critical for the formulation of the first biological theories.
It was between 1759 (Wolff) and 1859 (Darwin) that development evolved from a conception of transformation that moves towards the appropriate form of being to a conception of transformation that moves towards an ever more perfect form. During this period, evolution and development began to be used as interchangeable terms by scientists.
The transfer of the biological metaphor to the social sphere occurred in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Justus Moser, the conservative founder of social history, from 1768 used the word Entwicklung to allude to the gradual process of social change. When he talked about the transformation of some political situations, he described them almost as natural processes. In 1774, Herder started to publish his interpretation of universal history, in which he presented global correlations by comparing the ages of life with social history. But he went beyond this comparison, applying to his elaborations the organological notion of development coined in the scientific discussions of his time. He frequently used the image of the germ to describe the development of organizational forms. By the end of the century, based on the biological scale of Bonnet, he tried to combine the theory of nature with the philosophy of history in an attempt to create a systematic and consistent unity. Historical development was the continuation of natural development, according to him; and both were just variants of the homogeneous development of the cosmos, created by God.
Towards 1800, Entwicklung began to appear as a reflexive verb. Self-development became fashionable. God, then, started to disappear in the popular conception of the universe. And a few decades later, all possibilities were opened to the human subject, author of his own development, emancipated from the divine design. Development became the central category of Marx's work: revealed as a historical process that unfolds with the same necessary character of natural laws. Both the Hegelian concept of history and the Darwinist concept of evolution were interwoven in development, reinforced with the scientific aura of Marx.
When the metaphor returned to the vernacular, it acquired a violent colonizing power, soon employed by the politicians. It converted history into a programme: a necessary and inevitable destiny. The industrial mode of production, which was no more than one, among many, forms of social life, became the definition of the terminal stage of a unilinear way of social evolution. This stage came to be seen as the natural culmination of the potentials already existing in neolithic man, as his logical evolution. Thus 4 history was reformulated in Western terms.
The metaphor of development gave global hegemony to a purely Western genealogy of history, robbing peoples of different cultures of the opportunity to define the forms of their social life. The vernacular sequence (development is possible after envelopment) was inverted with the transfer. Scientific laws took the place of God in the enveloping function, defining the programme. Marx rescued a feasible initiative, based on the knowledge of those laws. Truman took over this perception, but transferred the role of prime mover – the primum movens condition – from the communists and the proletariat to the experts and to capital (thus, ironically, following the precedents set by Lenin and Stalin).
The debris of metaphors used throughout the eighteenth century began to become part of ordinary language in the nineteenth century, with the word 'development', accumulating in it a whole variety of connotations. This overload of meanings ended up dissolving its precise significance.
The Encyclopedia of All Systems of Teaching and Education was published in Germany in i860. Its entry on 'development' indicated that 'this concept is applied to almost all that man has and knows.' The word, said Eucken in 1878, 'has become almost useless for science, except in certain areas'.
Between 1875 and 1900 there were published, in English, books whose titles alluded to the development of the Athenian constitution, the English novel, the transportation system in the United States, marriage, parenting and so on. Some authors preferred 'evolution' in the title of their books studying the thermometer or the idea of God. Others preferred 'growth' in the title, but even they used development in the text as the principal operative term.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, a new use of the term became widespread. 'Urban development' has stood, since then, for a specific manner of reformulation of urban surroundings, based on the bulldozer and the massive, homogeneous industrial production of urban spaces and specialized installations. But this specific use, an anticipation of Trumanism, did not succeed in establishing the generalized image that is now associated with the word.
In the third decade of the century, the association between development and colonialism, established a century ago, acquired a different meaning. When the British government transformed its Law of Development of the Colonies into the Law of Development and Welfare of the Colonies in 1939, this reflected the profound economic and political mutation produced in less than a decade. To give the philosophy of the colonial protectorate a positive meaning, the British argued for the need to guarantee the natives minimum levels of nutrition, health and education. A 'dual mandate' started to be sketched: the conqueror should be capable of economically developing 5 the conquered region and at the same time accepting the responsibility of caring for the well-being of the natives. After the identification of the level of civilization with the level of production, the dual mandate collapsed into one: development.
Throughout the century, the meanings associated with urban development and colonial development concurred with many others to transform the word 'development', step by step, into one with contours that are about as precise as those of an amoeba. It is now a mere algorithm whose significance depends on the context in which it is employed. It may allude to a housing project, to the logical sequence of a thought, to the awakening of a child's mind, to a chess game or to the budding of a teenager's breasts. But even though it lacks, on its own, any precise denotation, it is firmly seated in popular and intellectual perception. And it always appears as an evocation of a net of significances in which the person who uses it is irremediably trapped.
Development cannot delink itself from the words with which it was formed – growth, evolution, maturation. Just the same, those who now use the word cannot free themselves from a web of meanings that impart a specific blindness to their language, thought and action. No matter the context in which it is used, or the precise connotation that the person using it wants to give it, the expression becomes qualified and coloured by meanings perhaps unwanted. The word always implies a favourable change, a step from the simple to the complex, from the inferior to the superior, from worse to better. The word indicates that one is doing well because one is advancing in the sense of a necessary, ineluctable, universal law and towards a desirable goal. The word retains to this day the meaning given to it a century ago by the creator of ecology, Haeckel: 'Development is, from this moment on, the magic word with which we will solve all the mysteries that surround us or, at least, that which will guide us towards their solution.'
But for two-thirds of the people on earth, this positive meaning of the word 'development' – profoundly rooted after two centuries of its social construction – is a reminder of what they are not. It is a reminder of an undesirable, undignified condition. To escape from it, they need to be enslaved to others' experiences and dreams.
COLONIZING ANTI-COLONIALISM
In the grandiose design of Truman's speech, there was no room for technical or theoretical precision. The emblem defines a programme conscious of Mao's arrival, looking for evolution as an antidote for revolution (in the Herder tradition) while simultaneously adopting the revolutionary impetus with which Marx endowed the word. The Truman design sometimes uses development in the transitive sense of the British colonial administrators, in order to establish clearly the hierarchy of initiatives that it promotes. But it can also pass without difficulty to the intransitive use of the term, in the finest Hegelian tradition.
As it was taken for granted that underdevelopment itself was out there, that it was something real, 'explanations' of the phenomenon began to appear. An intense search for its material and historical causes immediately started. Some, like Hirschman, gave no importance to the gestation period. Others, on the contrary, made this aspect the central element of their elaborations and described in painstaking detail colonial exploitation in all its variations and the processes of primitive accumulation of capital. Pragmatic attention also began to be given to the internal or external factors that seemed to be the current cause of underdevelopment: terms of trade, unequal exchange, dependency, protectionism, imperfections of the market, corruption, lack of democracy or entrepreneurship ...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Development Dictionary by Wolfgang Sachs. Copyright © 2010 Wolfgang Sachs. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Foreword to the New EditionIntroduction - Wolfgang Sachs
1. Development - Gustavo Esteva
2. Environment - Wolfgang Sachs
3. Equality - C. Douglas Lummis
4. Helping - Marianne Gronemeyer
5. Market - Gerard Berthoud
6. Needs - Ivan Illich
7. One World - Wolfgang Sachs
8. Participation - Majid Rahnema
9. Planning - Arturo Escobar
10. Population - Barbara Duden
11. Poverty - Majid Rahnema
12. Production - Jean Robert
13. Progress - Jose Maria Sbert
14. Resources - Vandana Shiva
15. Science - Claude Alvares
16. Socialism - Harry Cleaver
17. Standard of Living - Serge Latouche
18. State - Ashis Nandy
19. Technology - Otto Ullrich