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ANSWERING DEVELOPMENT CRITIQUES
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- DEVELOPMENT THINKING MANAGES THE OTHER
ANSWERING DEVELOPMENT CRITIQUESAnswering development critiques is much easier because you probably have the judge on your side from the beginning. It will be very difficult for your opponent to prove that the debate round should reject an Enlightenment framework valuing Western progress. One strategy that you should consider if you think that you’ve got the judge on your side is challenging the claim that development discourse invented all of the tragedies it sees in the Third World. Argue that some of what the West sees must be as bad as we think it is and that we should try to fix it. The trouble with this response is that, if your judge isn’t with you, it plays into the hands of your opponent by admitting that you take a development minded perspective. Shift the burden of proof to your opponent. It is up to them to show that the harms of discourse outweigh the value that you are claiming. You need to push your value very hard. Argue that the discursive problems with your position do not outweigh the need to help people in a very troubled state. Also argue that you do not engage in development discourse. You can distinguish development discourse from your own rhetoric by arguing that your position is that the technology of the West should be available to those who wish to use it. You can further this position by distinguishing the intent of your case from development. Your case seeks to offer aid if it is wanted while developers seek to force aid on people so that they can take advantage of them. For offense, try questioning the value of culture and forcing your opponent to defend culture at the top of a hierarchy of values. If culture is the greatest overriding consideration, what should we do if people are really suffering? Your opponent will have to defend some pretty bizarre cultural practices over values like life and autonomy to win. Ask what we should do about malnutrition if we can’t respond with aid? Your opponent won’t likely be able to respond to this except to say that culture is more important and that will bring the debate down to a face-off between the values of life and culture, which will go your way most of the time. Also ask lots of questions about the impacts of the use of development discourse. If you can pin your opponent down on how exactly the use of the discourse is harmful, you might be able to convince the judge that the harm link story is too ridiculous to vote for. Do not run progress as a value. That is good advice on any topic, but if the topic allows for this kind of a critique you should definitely stay away from it. Progress plays right into the hands of the argument and would be inescapable unless you could prove that Western definitions of progress were better than any other culture’s definitions. If a topic demands that you take a development-minded position, I recommend that you pick something that outweighs culture like life or autonomy. Be ready to defend these against development arguments that attempt to turn them by showing that people die because of development or that people get enslaved by development projects. CONCLUSION Value debate does not clash enough over the meanings of its own values. I’ve heard debaters argue for progress forever without really knowing questioning what sort of progress they were speaking about. When I asked them what progress meant, the answer was always some jargon about Western technological and societal progress. LD debaters can open new battlegrounds for value clashes if they question these meanings further. What is so good about Western technology? How are other people affected by it? Is development discourse is an imperialism to be attacked or a necessary paternalism to be welcomed? I look forward to seeing this debated out someday. BIBLIOGRAPHYZygmunt Bauman, LIFE IN FRAGMENTS: ESSAYS IN POSTMODERN MORALITY, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Press, 1995. Shirley Boskey, PROBLEMS AND PRACTICES OF DEVELOPMENT BANKS, Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1959. Stephen Eccles, SUPPORTING EFFECTIVE AID: A FRAMEWORK FOR FUTURE CONCESSIONAL FUNDING OF MULTILATERAL DEVELOPMENT BANKS, Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1999. Arturo Escobar, ENCOUNTERING DEVELOPMENT: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Richard Grabowski, DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Business, 1996. Catherine Gwin, U.S. RELATIONS WITH THE WORLD BANK: 1945-1992, Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994. Paul R. Krugman, DEVELOPMENT, GEOGRAPHY, AND ECONOMIC THEORY, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Philippe G. Le Prestre, THE WORLD BANK AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGE, London: Susquehanna University Press, 1989. Colin Leys, THE RISE & FALL OF DEVELOPMENT THEORY, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Raymond Frech Mikesell and Larry Williams, INTERNATIONAL BANKS AND THE ENVIRONMENT: FROM GROWTH TO SUSTAINABILITY, AN UNFINISHED AGENDA, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992. Carlos Pomareda, FINANCIAL POLICIES AND MANAGEMENT OF AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984. Saskia Sassen, GLOBALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS, New York: The New Press, 1998. DEVELOPMENT THINKING MANAGES THE OTHER1. DEVELOPMENT USES DISCOURSE TO MANAGE THE OTHER Arturo Escobar, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts, ENCOUNTERING DEVELOPMENT: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD, 1995, p.106. More than three-quarters of the population of the Third World lived in rural areas at the time of the inception of development. That this proportion is now reduced to less than 30 percent in many Latin American countries is a striking feature in its own right, as if the alleviation of the peasant’s suffering, malnutrition, and hunger had required not the improvement of living standards in the countryside, as most programs avowedly purported, but the peasants’ elimination as a cultural, social, and producing group. Nevertheless, peasants have not disappeared completely with the development of capitalism, as both Marxist and bourgeois economists ineluctably predicted, a fact already hinted at in my brief account of resistance in the previous chapter. The constitution of the peasantry as a persistent client category for development programs was associated with a broad range of economic, political, cultural, and discursive processes. It rested on the ability of the development apparatus system systematically to create client categories such as the “malnourished,” “small farmers,” “landless laborers,” “lactating women,” and the like which allow institutions to distribute socially individuals and populations in ways consistent with the creation and reproduction of modern capitalist relations. Discourses of hunger and rural development mediate and organize the constitution of the peasantry as producers or as elements to be displaced in the order of things. Unlike standard anthropological works on development, which take as their primary object of study the people to be “developed,” understanding the discursive and institutional construction of client categories requires that attention be shifted to the institutional apparatus that is doing the “developing." Turning the apparatus itself into an anthropological object involves an institutional ethnography that moves from the textual and work practices of institutions to the effects of those practices in the world, that is, to how they contribute to structuring the conditions under which people think and live their lives. The work of institutions is one of the most powerful forces in the creation of the world in which we live. Institutional ethnography is intended to bring to light this sociocultural production. 2. THE DISCOURSE DEVELOPS PEOPLE INTO SLAVES Zygmunt Bauman, University Of Leeds Professor Emeritus Of Sociology, LIFE IN FRAGMENTS: ESSAYS IN POSTMODERN MORALITY, 95, p. 29-33. But what is that `development' developing? One may say that the most conspicuously `developing' under `development' is the distance between what men and women make and what they need to appropriate and use in order to stay alive (however the `staying alive' may translate under the circumstances). Most obviously, `development' develops the dependency of men and women on things and events they can neither produce, control, see nor understand. Other humans' deeds send long waves which, when they reach the doorsteps, look strikingly like floods and other natural disasters; like them they come from nowhere, unannounced, and like them they make a mockery of foresight, cunning and prudence. However sincerely the planners may believe that they are, or at least can be, in control, and however strongly they believe that they see order in the flow of things ‑ for the victims (the `objects' of development) the change opens up the floodgates through which chaos and contingency pour into their, once orderly, lives. They feel lost now where once they felt at home. For the planners a disenchantment ‑ for them enchantment; a mind‑boggling mystery now wrapping tightly the once homely, transparent and familiar world. Now they do not know how to go on; and they do not trust their feet not steady enough to hold to the shifting and wobbly ground. They need props ‑ guides, experts, instructors, givers of commands.
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