The (im)possibility of development studies

Bibliographic Data

ID2159458
AuthorsStuart Corbridge
Year2007
Volume36
Issue2
Pages179-211
Publication date2007-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEconomy and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0308-5147 • E-ISSN: 1469-5766
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/03085140701264869
OpenAlexW2033168141
LanguageEN
Citations received47
References cited76

Development studies is commonly understood to be committed both to a principle of difference (the Third World is different, hence the need for a separate field of studies) and a principle of similarity (it is the job of development policy to make ‘them’ more like ‘us’). This double commitment has led to important challenges to the intellectual standing of the discipline and/or its object of study, development. This paper begins by reviewing five theorems which pronounce the impossibility of development studies. It then offers a more sympathetic account of the field. While recognizing the urgent need for development studies to be critical and at times oppositional, the paper suggests that an allied commitment to public policy-making can be taken as a sign of maturity. Development, and development studies, should be understood as sets of social practices, or technologies of rule, the organization and effects of which need to be (and in key respects are) contested and subjected to political and scholarly review. Keywords: developmentdevelopment studiesimpossibility theoremstechnologies of rulemorality of critique Notes 1. This paper was first presented as an invited lecture to the September 2005 annual conference of the UK's Development Studies Association. Although it has been adapted for publication, parts of the article betray their origins as spoken text. I am grateful to the DSA for the invitation, and to John Harriss, Barbara Harriss-White, Craig Jeffrey, Giles Mohan, Richard Palmer-Jones, Uma Kothari, Satish Kumar, Vicky Lawson, David Smith and Manoj Srivastava for their comments and questions. I am also grateful to Maxine Molyneux for her support. 2. A hard version of the similarity principle would involve something like the processes of Americanization or Westernization set out by modernization theorists in the 1950s; weaker and more contemporary versions might propose models of late-industrialization or growth-enhancing governance, including those associated with East Asia. 3. Given this definition, many of the arguments in this paper will not apply to ‘critical development studies’, or that enterprise which uncouples the critical and applied parts of the subject. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that critical development studies is innocent in policy terms: to the extent that it is fiercely critical of ‘development’ or capitalism or globalization it is bound to suggest forms of counter-politics and policy-making that should be subject to close scrutiny (see also the sixth section, ‘The morality of critique’). 4. See the next section, ‘Impossibility theorems’; see also Edwards (Citation1989), Esteva (Citation1992), Hall (Citation1992), Mohanty (Citation1988), Parpart (Citation1993), Power (Citation2002), Rist (Citation1997), Slater (Citation1992), Bauer (Citation1991) and Krueger (Citation1974). 5. Haberler (Citation1987). 6. See Escobar (Citation1995, including back cover blurb by Ashis Nandy); on de-linking, see Esteva and Prakash (Citation1997). 7. The outstanding essay on this is still that by Pletsch (Citation1981), but see also Nils Gilman's (Citation2003) wonderful account of modernization theory in Cold War America; see too the essays in Cooper and Packard (1997). On the post-Cold War era, see Simon (Citation1999). 8. See Rose (Citation1999) and Dean (Citation1999). For a discussion of technologies of rule in the context of the state's ‘war on poverty’ in eastern India, see Corbridge et al. (Citation2005). For Nigeria, see Watts (Citation2003). 9. I do not discuss the claim that development studies is not an academic discipline, although this argument is often made in the UK to justify its status (mainly) as a postgraduate degree programme – one suitable to people who have already been trained in economics, political science, sociology or some other subject with a core body of ‘theory’. 10. Cowen and Shenton (Citation1996: 61). The distinction refers to immanent process versus intended practice. Even if there was no ‘development industry’ there would be development in the sense of social, economic and political changes that induce a sense of dislocation or unease, and which need some form of state-sponsored amelioration. 11. Gandhi (Citation1997 [1908]), Schumacher (1970), Baran (Citation1973 [1957]) and Frank (Citation1967). Clearly, there are other impossibility theorems than the ones discussed here: the critique of development from the perspective of deep ecology is one obvious example. 12. Friedman (1957) and Bauer (Citation1974). 13. Bauer (Citation1954, Citation1976), Krueger (Citation1974) and Johnson (Citation1972). 14. For the impasse debate, see Booth (Citation1985), Schuurman (Citation1993). 15. Said (Citation1978: 28), quoting Raymond Williams (Citation1958: 376). By ‘universals’, he had in mind ideas of justice and human rights in the struggles of the Palestinians and other dominated groups (Said Citation1992 [1979]). 16. Escobar published significant papers between Citation1984 and 1995, of course: see especially Escobar (Citation1988, Citation1991). 17. For a discussion of high modernist versions of development, see Scott (Citation1998). 18. Chambers (Citation1983, Citation1997) and Uphoff (Citation1996). 19. Uvin (Citation1998) and de Waal (Citation1997, Citation2005 [1989]). 20. Putnam et al. (Citation1993) and Putnam (Citation1995); see also Woolcock (Citation1998). 21. See Mosse (Citation2001); see also Kumar and Corbridge (Citation2002). 22. See Bhagwati (Citation1993) and Krueger (Citation2002), and compare Chandresekhar and Ghosh (Citation2002). For an overview, see Harriss and Corbridge (Citation2003). 23. The best review remains that by White (Citation1996). 24. North (Citation1990), Rodrik (Citation2006), Sen (Citation2000) and Stiglitz (Citation2003). See also Gray (Citation2000) and of course Polanyi (Citation2001 [1944]). For a more considered review of the history of development economics, see Meier (Citation2004). 25. Sachs now visits the countries that he advises armed with a ‘checklist’ of questions on such things as the extent of extreme poverty, economic policy, the fiscal framework, cultural barriers to economic development, patterns of governance, geopolitics and physical geography and human ecology. An example of a checklist is given on p. 84 of Sachs’ book, in the middle of his discussion of ‘clinical economics’. We are given to suppose that most governments or visiting economists fail to make checklists of this sort. 26. Corbridge (Citation1998), Kiely (Citation1999) and Pieterse (Citation2000). Compare Nandy (Citation2003) and Sylvester (Citation1999). 27. Notably, Lewis (Citation1955) and Rostow (1960). 28. The figure for China in 1950 is not robust. We know, however, that life expectancy at birth in China in 1960 was about 47; this figure rose to 70 by 1999. The corresponding figures for India are 44 and 63 over the same period of thirty-nine years. For discussion, see Drèze and Sen (Citation2002): 114–15). Appallingly, the median age of death in sub-Saharan Africa in the early-1990s was just under 5 years (see Sen in Farmer Citation2003). 29. Lehmann (Citation1997). 30. Compare with Bayart et al. (Citation1999), Chabol and Daloz (Citation1999), Cooper (Citation2002) and Mamdani (Citation1996). 31. Moore (Citation1994). 32. Chatterjee has also long been a member of the subaltern studies collective of historians and social scientists. 33. On Nehru, see Zachariah (Citation2004). Gandhi also had particular ideas on what it was to be Indian: see Alter (Citation2000). 34. This was also the thesis, in large part, of Barrington Moore Jr (Citation1966); see also Bardhan (Citation1984) and Corbridge and Harriss (Citation2000). 35. Hansen (Citation2002). 36. Chief Ministers at various points since 1990 in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh respectively. DaMatta, significantly, refers to ‘the existence [in Brazil of a] ... double code with respect to the relative importance of equality and hierarchy’ (Citation1991 [1978]: 168). 37. This raises important questions, of course, about which groups one might work with, and why. Is the proposal that the CPI-M and Shiv Sena be dealt with on an equal basis? If not, why not? How civil should political society be? 38. For key contributions, see Dollar and Kray (Citation2002) and Gupta (Citation1998). 39. A large part of the decline in the all-India headcount ratios from 1993–4 to 1999–2000 seems to have been caused by changes in the way that official estimates were made between the 50th and 55th rounds of the National Sample Survey. On this, see Deaton and Drèze (Citation2002). Poverty declines in the 1980s were substantial and had to do with government anti-poverty programmes and, more importantly, with labour market tightening following the spread of Green Revolution technologies from coastal areas and the north west. 40. These lectures comprise the main part of the text of The Politics of the Governed. They were given in New York in November 2001. 41. Harriss-White (Citation2003) and Breman (Citation2004). 42. For discussion, see Chatterjee (Citation1997a, Citationb), Kaviraj (Citation1991) and Inden (Citation1995). See also the essays in Fuller and Bénéï (Citation2001). 43. Hansen (Citation2001: 35) distinguishes between an imagination of the state split into ‘sublime’ and ‘profane’ dimensions. 44. Beteille (Citation1999). 45. See Chaudhuri and Heller (Citation2002) and Corbridge (Citation2004). More generally, and in cautionary terms, see Mohan and Stokke (Citation2000). 46. For further discussion, see Chandhoke (Citation2003) and Jayal (Citation1999). 47. Corbridge et al. (Citation2005). See also Bhattacharya (Citation1999) and Deverajan and Shah (Citation2004). 48. There are echoes here of Fanon's (Citation1965) discussion of the Voice of Algeria. 49. For further discussion, see Jenkins and Goetz (Citation1999). See also Farrington et al. (Citation2003). 50. It should be noted that Rudolph and Rudolph are fully aware of the enormous backlog of cases facing the court system in India at the highest levels (765,426 cases in the Allahabad High Court alone in 1995: Rudolph and Rudolph Citation2001: 137), and of the fact that judicial activism has often been in response to pressures that first emerged in civil society, and with environmental and human rights activists in particular (as in the cases of opposition to ‘environmental degradation and big dams (Narmada, Tehri), [and] child and bonded labor’ and demands for ‘Dalit (ex-untouchable) empowerment, and historical and cultural preservation’: ibid.: 137). 51. This paragraph and the preceding one draw from Corbridge et al. (Citation2005: ch. 7). The next section, ‘The morality of critique’, also draws on and partly develops arguments made there in chapter 9. While Glyn, Manoj and René are implicated in these specific arguments, they bear no responsibility for the broader arguments of this paper. 52. Not only is social capital difficult to measure, but it is unclear why it should be made the independent variable in the World Bank's model. Many scholars think that Putnam has causality back to front, or at the very least that ‘social capital’ is one part of a broader loop of interactive processes. See Tarrow (Citation1996). 53. Chang (Citation2002). See also Wade (Citation1990) and Khan (Citation2005). Mushtaq Khan draws a useful distinction between market-enhancing and growth-enhancing good governance agendas. 54. It is a logical error to suppose that a form of critique that shows that ‘capitalism’ is associated with negative outcomes a, b and c (say unemployment, pollution and inequality) is in itself an argument for socialism or something that is ‘not capitalism’. That argument would need to show that the alternative is not also associated with a, b or c and/or is not damaged by negative outcomes d, e, f and g. 55. Livingstone (Citation1992), Driver (Citation2000) and Kuper (Citation1996). 56. Corbridge (Citation1993) and Smith (Citation2000). 57. Important recent contributions have come from Dasgupta (Citation2001), Firebaugh (Citation2003), Kohli (Citation2004), Rodrik (2006), Rodrik et al. (Citation2004), Sachs et al. (Citation2001), Stern et al. (Citation2005), Wade (Citation2004) and Wolf Citation2005 [2004], among others. 58. Jenkins (Citation2002) and Leftwich (Citation1993). But see also Tendler (Citation1997

Political science · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · International Development and Aid · Social and Economic Development in India

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