Development E-Book

Anthony Payne

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Concepts
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 372

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Just about everyone is 'for' development as an assumed 'good', yet few seem to have a concrete idea of what the term actually entails. Development offers a comprehensive and wide-ranging analysis of the various ways in which this important concept has been used in social and political analysis over the past 200 years.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

KEY CONCEPTS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

1 Classical Theories

Classical Liberal Economic Theory

Classical Historical Materialism

Classical Economic Sociology

Conclusion

2 Catch-up Theories

Nationalist Versions

Communist Versions

Conclusion

3 Golden Age Theories

Growth Theory

Modernisation Theory

Underdevelopment Theory

Conclusion

4 Neoliberal and Neostatist Theories

The Neoliberal ‘Counter-Revolution’

Neostatism and the Battle for the East Asian ‘Miracle’

The New Crisis of Development Theory in the 1990s

Conclusion

5 Alternative Theories

Human Development Approaches

Gender Approaches

Environmental Approaches

‘Post-development’ Approaches

Conclusion

6 Contemporary Theoretical Directions

Neoliberalism: From the Washington Consensus to the Post-Washington Consensus

China and the Rise of the ‘East’

Approaches to Poverty and Inequality

‘Global’ Theories of Development

Conclusion

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

KEY CONCEPTS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Published

Barbara Adam, Time

Alan Aldridge, Consumption

Alan Aldridge, The Market

Jakob Arnoldi, Risk

Colin Barnes and Geoff Mercer, Disability

Darin Barney, The Network Society

Mildred Blaxter, Health

Harriet Bradley, Gender

Harry Brighouse, Justice

David Runciman and Monica Brita Vieira, Representation

Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism 2nd edition

Margaret Canovan, The People

Alejandro Colás, Empire

Anthony Elliott, Concepts of the Self 2nd edition

Steve Fenton, Ethnicity

Katrin Flikschuh, Freedom

Michael Freeman, Human Rights

Russell Hardin, Trust

Geoffrey Ingham, Capitalism

Fred Inglis, Culture

Robert H. Jackson, Sovereignty

Jennifer Jackson Preece, Minority Rights

Gill Jones, Youth

Paul Kelly, Liberalism

Anne Mette Kjær, Governance

Ruth Lister, Poverty

Jon Mandle, Global Justice

Anthony Payne and Nicola Phillips, Development

Judith Phillips, Care

Michael Saward, Democracy

John Scott, Power

Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism

Stuart White, Equality

Copyright © Anthony Payne & Nicola Phillips 2010

The right of Anthony Payne & Nicola Phillips to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2010 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3067-0

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3068-7(paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-7456-5736-3(Single-user ebook)

ISBN: 978-0-7456-5735-6(Multi-user ebook)

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For Steve and Jill

Preface

The question of what it is that we study as students of development is one which has preoccupied us for many years – what development is, what we mean by the term, how it should be studied, what the field looks like, how it used to look, and what its future should be. When we were approached by Polity Press to write this book for its ‘Key Concepts’ series, it seemed like an ideal moment for us to try to distil and consolidate what had cumulatively been many hours of conversation and discussion over a good decade or so, in many different parts of the world, and probably over several bottles of wine! Our collaboration over this time had produced a joint conviction that the study of development needed to be rehabilitated by rooting it firmly in the broader intellectual enterprise of political economy, and it is this prospectus that we seek to lay out and justify in this book. Indeed, as we shall show, it is only relatively recently that the study of development and the study of political economy have come to be seen as residing within separate fields. It was not so ‘in the beginning’, one might say, and thus our aim here is more properly to argue for a re-rooting of the study of development in political economy and to set out one way at least of working through the implications of such an undertaking.

As with all books, our debts in terms of intellectual inspiration, encouragement and direct assistance are considerable. Our ideas owe much to formal and informal interactions with a large number of colleagues and friends, some working in the field of development, some working more broadly in the field of political economy, some just friends. We note too the contribution of many students to whom we have tried to teach ‘development’ and who, as good students do, have asked us plenty of probing and thought-provoking questions. We are grateful in a practical way to Louise Knight and Rachel Donnelly at Polity for their exemplary editorial shepherding of this project and very useful suggestions along the way. We hope that the book will seem easy to read and will make sense to its readers. Above all, we hope that its publication will lead to a renewed focus on the study of development within political economy. This is much needed in present times.

Anthony Payne and Nicola Phillips

March 2009

Introduction

The concept of development has never been in greater need of analysis and clarification than in the present era. Indeed, a point has been reached where it urgently needs to be unpacked by informed, rigorous thinking. The reasons for this are twofold and connected: on the one hand, the word has come to be extraordinarily widely used in public discourse, probably more so than ever before in its history; on the other hand, it has perhaps never been deployed so glibly, and in general so little questioned and understood, as in the early years of this century.

The first claim is easy enough to substantiate. One has only to recall the titles of many major international organisations, from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The World Trade Organization (WTO) has also lately sought to bring to fruition a so-called Doha ‘Development’ Round. The United States has within its governmental structure a body called the Agency for International Development (USAID); the United Kingdom has a specialist ministry called the Department for International Development (DfID); whilst for its part the European Commission has long had a Directorate-General for Development. What is more, a conference of over 150 heads of state meeting under UN auspices in New York in September 2000 enjoined the world to pursue a series of ‘Millennium Development Goals’ (MDGs), and another large gathering of political leaders meeting in Johannesburg in August–September 2002 deliberated under the rubric of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD). It is also the case that civil society more than matches government in its embrace of the concept: witness the work of the World Development Movement (WDM), the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), Development Alternatives with Women in a New Era (DAWN) and sundry other development-oriented non-governmental organisations. What is it that all these diverse bodies can be trying to achieve?

The second claim is a matter of judgement. Nevertheless, the argument can powerfully be made that the concept of development is now deployed more and more unthinkingly in public discourse, often being put up simply as a slogan or as a signifier of support for something that is deemed, straightforwardly, to be a ‘good’. H. W. Arndt noticed this tendency back in 1987. He observed that ‘anyone who asked articulate citizens in developed or developing countries what they meant by this desirable objective of “development” would get a great variety of answers’. In fact, he offered a rather revealing list of the diverse things they might say, as follows:

Higher living standards. A rising per capita income. Increase in productive capacity. Mastery over nature. Freedom through control of man’s environment. Economic growth. But not mere growth, growth with equity. Elimination of poverty. Basic needs satisfaction. Catching up with the developed countries in technology, wealth, power, status. Economic independence, self-reliance. Scope for self-fulfilment for all. Liberation, the means to human ascent.

Arndt added, somewhat sardonically, that ‘development, in the vast literature on the subject, appears to have come to encompass almost all facets of the good society, everyman’s road to utopia’ (Arndt 1987: 1). In the intervening twenty years, during which even more has been said and written about development, the essential truth of this observation has become ever more manifest. Everybody, or nearly everybody, is ‘for’ development; they are ‘for’ it generally because they think that most other people are too, though few bother to define the term, and even fewer ponder or probe what it is that they are talking about.

It should be the case that the scholarly literature can be excused such criticisms, and, in part, it clearly can. There undoubtedly exists a great deal of incisive and thoughtful writing about development by scholars deeply committed to their chosen field of enquiry. However, most scholars who study development work in the self-proclaimed field of ‘development studies’ seek to defend that field strongly from the scrutiny and critical attention of social scientists from other quarters. This is unfortunate. There is no denying at all that development studies has had an heroic history. Indeed, we have argued previously that ‘in its heyday it was an exemplar of all that was best about the social sciences – interdisciplinary, focused on big questions, engaged with them, political in the most generous sense of that word’ (Payne 2004: 2). But that phase in the history of this sub-field has passed, and development studies, for all of its continuing merits, is no longer quite such a vibrant field of enquiry and debate – as some of its adherents openly admit. In fact, more than two decades ago David Booth (1985) declared that an ‘impasse’ had been reached in the field, a claim which quickly became the new orthodoxy. What is more, the harsh truth is that, despite the self-conscious efforts of Franz Schuurman (1993) and others to break out beyond the impasse, no basis on which to organise this theoretical advance has been found that has proved to be acceptable across the sub-field. In consequence, contemporary development studies, although still a sizeable academic enterprise in many Western countries, is at the same time an uncertain and under-confident discipline.

We believe, and will seek to demonstrate in this book, that the way forward is to move away from the notion of a specialist field devoted to the study of development. We shall not therefore proceed to unpick this field by considering in turn different (anthropological, economic, geographical, political, social) concepts of, or approaches to, development. We shall instead adopt a different and perhaps bolder method, endeavouring to re-ground the contemporary analysis of development fully and squarely within the wider, and indeed even older, intellectual tradition of political economy.

This is not the place to set out a comprehensive review of the academic discipline of political economy. Other studies over the years have done that very well (Staniland 1985; Gill and Law 1988; Frieden and Lake 1991; Caporaso and Levine 1992; Watson, 2005). The point to highlight and build upon is that within political economy lately much ‘critical’ (or new, or heterodox, or counter-hegemonic) thinking has come to prominence. Drawing inspiration in the broadest sense from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and within the field of political economy from the founding work of Robert Cox, this approach self-consciously set out to be ‘critical in the sense that it stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how that order came about’ (Cox 1981: 129). In Cox’s particular formulation, it was a theory of history concerned not just with the past but with a continuing process of change; it was directed to the social and political complex as a whole rather than its separate parts; and it contained within its ambit the possibility of identifying the outlines of alternative distributions of power from those prevailing at any given time. It was also, classically, ‘a method of historical structures’ (Cox 1981: 137), with the latter conceived as configurations of forces that do not determine actions but nevertheless create opportunities and impose constraints. In other words, it is argued within critical political economy that agency-oriented concepts must of necessity be embedded within structural concepts. In another statement made several years ago, a group of us suggested that the defining feature of a critical (or, as we preferred to call it, ‘new’) political economy methodology should be that it would reject ‘the old dichotomy between agency and structure, and states and markets, which fragmented classical political economy into separate disciplines’ and recognise instead the need to ‘develop an integrated analysis, by combining parsimonious theories which analyse agency in terms of rationality with contextual theories which analyse structures institutionally and historically’ (Gamble et al. 1996: 5–6). We stand by that prospectus and aim to put it to work in this historical account of the key political economy concept of development.

On the basis of this explicitly political economy perspective we set out a particular approach to the analysis of development. It has three distinguishing features.

The first defines development as the object of strategy. The argument here is really a reminder of the importance of agency. It only makes sense to think of development as the intended goal of somebody or something. There has to be an actor that is putatively being developed. In psychology that actor might be an individual whose personality and human attributes can or cannot develop fully. In political economy, at least until recently, that actor was invariably a national polity/economy/society seeking to develop in accordance with its ambitions and its opportunities. In the contemporary era, development is pursued by actors in a variety of spatial settings (such as cities, or regions defined in both sub-national and supra-national fashion, or indeed perhaps even the globe as a whole), which thereby find themselves drawn into the development discourse. Equally, the focus on who or what is putatively being developed has shifted from an exclusive concern with nation-states and countries to encompass individual people and social groups, which may or may not be defined by their location in a national society/polity.The second feature recognises and seeks to uncover the contested ideological dimension of all such development strategies. The argument here is in turn a reminder of the extent to which human beings are bound to disagree about the content of development, about what exactly it might mean for a country (or a city or a region, or a group of people) to be said to be developing. The particular ideological associations that inevitably underpin different concepts of development have long been in dispute, precisely because definitions of the ‘good society’ vary. Liberals are thus not likely to see development in the same way as conservatives and socialists. Particular conceptualisations of development thus inevitably sit within broader theories of development. That is obvious enough, but it is nevertheless something that needs both to be emphasised, and recovered, in analysis.The third feature locates all theories of development in their historical contexts and sees them as being always historically conditioned. The argument here is ultimately epistemological, in that it rejects the view of those who think they can specify the meaning of development in some scientific sense. In our view, by contrast, ideas about development cannot but be shaped, and consequently limited, by time and place. They emerge out of particular historical situations and they change as a result of particular historical events. The story (indeed, more precisely, the many, many stories) of development can therefore only be told historically in full awareness of the changing usage of this ubiquitous term over a long period of time.

There is one other aspect of the approach we take to our material which, if not entirely novel, is rather different from most accounts in this area of debate. In many books seeking to review the concept of development it is presumed that development theory did not begin until 1945, with the emergence of the so-called ‘developing countries’. It would, however, be more accurate to say that it was development as a political project – that is, as a programme of change that ‘developing countries’ should be encouraged to pursue by the already ‘developed countries’ – that took off in that optimistic post-Second World War period. Indeed, the project can genuinely be said to have run on ever since, right up to and beyond the setting of the Millennium Development Goals at the beginning of the new century. We have also reached a point too, where the distinction that used to be so firmly drawn between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries no longer makes any sense in a world composed of 192 countries with vastly differing levels of wealth and resource endowment (Payne 2005a). But this is not actually the key point to stress here. It is rather that the ‘developed countries’, if that is what they are or have been, must themselves have also experienced development in an earlier historical epoch, and thus have been the focus of the first development theories. It does not matter from this perspective that these were not thought of at the time as being development theories, for on this reading that is what they actually were. The divorce of the study of political economy from the study of development is in fact a recent phenomenon, generated in good part by the emergence of a specialised sub-field of ‘international political economy’ in the United States in the 1970s, focused almost exclusively on the analysis of interactions amongst the core advanced capitalist countries of our time (Phillips 2005b). In this book, therefore, we begin the story of development not with the espousal of a self-conscious development programme post-1945, but rather with an account of those classical theories of political economy that arose alongside and in response to the initial moves towards development of the ‘first mover’ developed countries.

However, even this broadening of our lens will probably not be enough for those analysts who argue that ‘Western civilisation’ in fact had ‘Eastern origins’. The contention is that we need to look to the East, not the West, for the early developers and, by implication, for the earliest development theories. In one sense, this is quite an old argument, but it has lately been restated by John Hobson with great verve and compelling use of a mass of historical evidence – his argument is thus one with which we need to engage, at least momentarily. Hobson seeks to undermine the orthodoxy that ‘it is the “autonomous” or “pristine” West that has alone pioneered the creation of the modern world’ (Hobson 2004: 1). By contrast, he argues:

First, the Easterners created a global economy and global communications network after [the year] 500 along which the more advanced Eastern ‘resource portfolios’ (e.g. Eastern ideas, institutions and technologies) diffused across to the West, where they were subsequently assimilated, through what I call oriental globalisation. And second, Western imperialism after 1492 led the Europeans to appropriate all manner of Eastern economic resources to enable the rise of the West. In short, the West did not autonomously pioneer its own development in the absence of Eastern help, for its rise would have been inconceivable without the contributions of the East. (Hobson 2004: 2–3)

As already indicated, Hobson is generally persuasive as regards the broad historical record and even more convincing in his argument that Eurocentric accounts err by asking a biased question at the outset, namely, ‘what was it about the West that enabled its breakthrough to capitalist modernity?’ It can be agreed that such an interrogation will not do as a starting point if the aim is to produce empathic world history which appreciates that ‘modernisation is a continuous process and one in which regions have taken part in leap-frogging fashion’ (Goody 1996: 7). However, from our perspective, the real point to make is that what Hobson deems to be Eurocentric explanations of the rise of the West did give birth to the first theories of development, precisely because of European political power and its associated capacity to project its account of events around the world. In its origins, development theory may well have been Eurocentric, but that cannot mean that we should not recognise when and where this type of thinking began.

Accordingly, Chapter 1 of this book explores those classical theories of development that sought to explain the beginnings of European capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing in particular on the writings of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Max Weber. Chapter 2 focuses on theorists of ‘catch-up’ development, contrasting nationalist with communist versions and focusing principally on United States, German and Soviet experiences. Chapter 3 reviews the glory days of development theory, namely, the contest between modernisation theory, on the one hand, and dependency and world system theory, on the other, which dominated the debate from 1945 to the mid 1970s. Chapter 4 looks at a similar contest that dominated the 1980s and 1990s – the rivalry of neoliberalism and neostatism. Chapter 5 moves on to consider a range of alternative theories – the various human development, gendered, environmental and postmodern critiques of all forms of development theory – that also emerged in the latter years of the twentieth century and often acted as the counterpoint to the neoliberal/neostatist rivalry. Chapter 6 brings the story up to date by considering the key directions being taken in development theory in the early twenty-first century, including the turn of neoliberalism towards notions of governance and social capital, discussion of the implications of the rise of China, new debates surrounding poverty and inequality, and, of course, the significance for development theory of the reality of contemporary globalisation. The Conclusion reflects once more upon the three distinguishing features of the approach to the study of development proposed in this introduction and carried through into the analysis contained in the body of the book, and shows, finally, how the concept of development can – and indeed should – sit at the heart of a vigorous ‘new political economy’.

1

Classical Theories

Classical theories of development address that long drawn-out period of interlocking economic, political and social change, extending from the sixteenth right through to the nineteenth century, during which key parts of Europe entered the modern age of capitalism and industrialisation. Unsurprisingly, given the extent and the complexity of the transition that was unfolding, the attention of a series of highly original thinkers was engaged and a variety of readings of these momentous events was assembled. In the process, classical political economy was born. As we indicated in the Introduction, the theories that were proposed to account for these changes were not self-consciously described at the time as theories of development. But that hardly obscures the fact that they were seeking to identify the essence of the fundamental shift in the pattern of economic, political and social organisation that was gradually taking place in Europe. In the language of the present book we would say that they were all trying to explain Europe’s initial move towards what later came to be called ‘development’.