corbridge the impossibility of development studies

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The (im)possibility of development studiesStuart Corbridge

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The (im)possibility ofdevelopment studies

Stuart Corbridge

Abstract

Development studies is commonly understood to be committed both to a principleof difference (the Third World is different, hence the need for a separate field ofstudies) 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 tothe intellectual standing of the discipline and/or its object of study, development.This paper begins by reviewing five theorems which pronounce the impossibility ofdevelopment studies. It then offers a more sympathetic account of the field. Whilerecognizing the urgent need for development studies to be critical and at timesoppositional, the paper suggests that an allied commitment to public policy-makingcan be taken as a sign of maturity. Development, and development studies, should beunderstood as sets of social practices, or technologies of rule, the organization andeffects of which need to be (and in key respects are) contested and subjected topolitical and scholarly review.

Keywords: development; development studies; impossibility theorems; technologiesof rule; morality of critique.

Introduction

Development studies is an unusual enterprise.1 It is committed both to the

principle of difference (the Third World is different, hence the need for a

separate field of studies) and to the principle of similarity (it is the job of

development policy to make ‘them’ more like ‘us’).2 This is a crude

characterization, but it is not an inaccurate view of how many people see

the subject. In this paper, I will argue that the double commitment that lies at

Stuart Corbridge, Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics and Political

Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright # 2007 Taylor & Francis

ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online

DOI: 10.1080/03085140701264869

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the heart of development studies is a source of strength � a sign of maturity

even � as well as of weakness.3

That it is a source of weakness is well understood. The field of development

studies has been painted in recent years as irrelevant, teleological, colonial in

intent, masculinist, dirigiste and/or a vehicle for depoliticization and the

extension of bureaucratic state power. It stands accused of being the source

of many of the problems of the so-called Third World.4 Some economists have

called for a return to mono-economics, or the doctrine that the essential truths

of neo-classical economics hold independent of time and place.5 Many on the

post-Left, meanwhile, have placed developmentalism under the spotlight

of the post-colonial turn. They prefer to see development as a set of

experimental techniques that produces the ‘Third World’ as a pathologized site

of difference/underdevelopment. It then stands ready to be ‘mended’ by the

agencies of a richer First World. In some cases, as for example in the work of

Arturo Escobar, the call has been floated for the dis-invention of development.

Escobar and others have also called for the de-linking of the ‘less economically

accomplished countries’ from forms of governmentality which lock them into a

game in which they cannot hope to compete.6

What is less well understood is that the forms of rule which have been

proposed by development practitioners � including, most recently, doctrines

such as participation, good governance and sustainability � are neither

singular nor are they unidirectional in their effects. It is right that the

concept(s) and practice(s) of development are rendered problematic. We also

need to understand that the origins of development studies were closely linked

to the beginnings of a Cold War between the First and Second Worlds, and

that the broader development business is often beholden to geopolitics.7

Recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq tell their own story. Yet it is obvious that

there are social and economic problems in poor countries, as in all countries,

and that these problems must be addressed by particular forms of government

and non-government intervention, the effects of which cannot always be

anticipated. Governmentality is not something that can be escaped from, at

least not if a person, group or country wants to participate in generalized

forms of production, exchange and rule.8 It follows that development studies

should not be condemned for its schizophrenia; rather, we need to understand

and constantly challenge the particular forms of governmentality that are

sponsored in its name. In addition, I want to propose that what might be called

‘the responsibilities of critique’ should not be reduced to the oppositional, nor

should deconstructive forms of criticism be elevated above other forms of

critique, whether radical (free market or Marxist), pragmatic or apparently

non-judgemental. Development studies might be under sharp attack, but it

should not be put on the defensive simply because of its commitments to

difference and sameness. What matters is the way in which these commitments

are combined, not the fact that they are made at all.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The second section outlines

four of the most pressing critiques that have been made of all or some parts of

180 Economy and Society


development studies since 1980. The third section notes some objections that

have or can be raised against the first three impossibility theorems set out in

the second section. In the fourth section I consider how the work of Partha

Chatterjee sits alongside and develops the fourth of these theorems. Chatterjee

is less well known in development studies than Arturo Escobar, Deepak Lal,

Jean-Philippe Platteau, Robert Bates or James Ferguson, but his work has

considerable implications for the subject. I am most concerned here with

Chatterjee’s work on the contradictions of colonial and post-colonial

modernity. This work leads him to conclude that the idea of civil society

has little purchase for poor people in what he calls ‘most of the world’.

Chatterjee suggests that poorer people must deal with governmental institu-

tions through mediating agencies in political society. In the fifth section

I consider the value and purchase of Chatterjee’s critique of civil society, and

also of development more broadly. There is considerable merit in this critique.

At the same time, I challenge the usefulness of the ‘civil versus political

society’ distinction around which Chatterjee’s argument is fastened. I do so

with reference to village meetings in Bihar and West Bengal, India, and with

regard to such everyday markers of modernity as queuing (waiting in line),

complaining and photocopying. The sixth section tries to generalize these

observations. I focus on the epistemological basis of impossibility arguments

and on the politics of the critique they embrace. Many critics of development

studies share a commitment to an ‘ideal outside’. This is a perfect vantage

point from which all things are judged. I suggest that the moral high ground

that is sometimes sought by these critics (Escobar and Lal more so than

Chatterjee) is no high ground at all. Max Weber once argued that an

intellectual in the service of moral forces must take responsibility for the

actions that are proposed, both explicitly and implicitly, in his or her name.

I reflect on this observation in the sixth section and in a short conclusion.

Impossibility theorems

The claim that development studies is in crisis will ring hollow in some

quarters. If we look at the number of journals in the discipline, for example,

and the vitality of them (as measured, for example, by acceptance to

submission rates (less so in terms of impact factors)) the subject is doing

well. Economic Development and Cultural Change was the first journal of

development studies. It began publication in Chicago in 1952. Later came

Development (US, 1957), the Journal of Development Studies (UK, 1964),

Development and Change (Netherlands, 1970), World Development (US, 1973),

Third World Quarterly (UK, 1979), the Journal of International Development

(UK, 1989) and Progress in Development Studies (UK, 2001), along with more

focused journals for development professionals and area studies specialists.

Development sociology supports its own specialty groups on both sides of

the Atlantic, as do development geography, development anthropology and

Stuart Corbridge: The (im)possibility of development studies 181


development economics. New programmes in development studies are

continuing to open in Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia and

New Zealand. There are fewer programmes in the global South, but large

numbers of students from countries there have taken graduate-level courses on

development issues. My own university, the London School of Economics and

Political Science, takes it as read that the word ‘development’ in the title of a

Master’s degree is a positive selling point. Many of the students who graduate

from these degrees hope to work for the ‘development business’. Some aim

for the UN institutions, others for national aid agencies, NGOs and

campaigning groups, and still others for management consultancies like Price

Waterhouse Coopers.

Away from the worlds of business and masters degrees, however, there is a

looming sense of unease about the enterprise of development studies.9 In part,

this stems from misunderstanding about the purpose and aims of the field, as

we shall see. Within human geography and cultural anthropology the word

‘development’ is so mistrusted that some departments are reluctant to hire in

this area or to mount courses under its name, the preference being for modules

on globalization or post-colonial studies. The idea that development might be

‘immanent’, rather than ‘intentional’, to use a helpful distinction proposed by

Cowen and Shenton, is largely ignored.10 In part, though, the unease I detect

is underpinned by a growing number of intellectual arguments that demand

attention. These arguments advance one or other version of an impossibility

theorem. They maintain � as thinkers as diverse as Mohandas Gandhi,

Ernest Schumacher, Paul Baran and Andre Gunder Frank maintained before

them � that ‘development’, as conventionally defined, cannot be prosecuted

successfully in ex-colonial countries for one or more reasons.11 Here, I briefly

consider four versions of the impossibility theorem. The propositions

advanced by one version will sometimes be held in some degree by another.

They are treated under separate headings for convenience.

The misconceptions of ‘development economics’

The most influential critique of development studies since 1980 has come from

the neoliberal (or liberal) ‘Right’. As always, there were antecedents. Milton

Friedman denounced foreign aid programmes shortly after they began in the

1950s, and Peter Bauer was dubbed Lord Anti-Aid by the British newspaper,

The Observer, for his own forthright views on the dangers of foreign

assistance.12 Bauer suggested that the Third World was called into existence

by the giving of aid, an argument that was later adapted by Arturo Escobar to

serve a very different political project. Bauer also developed a challenging and

largely consistent line of thought on the absurdities of dirigisme in West Africa.

He spoke up in defence of the African entrepreneur. He also joined with Anne

Krueger and Harry Johnson in linking dirigiste economic strategies to the



formation of predatory political regimes and the generalized pursuit of rent-

seeking behaviour.13

These were the first stirrings of what John Toye called ‘the counter-

revolution in development theory and policy’ (1987). They were brought to the

boil in 1983 in a pamphlet written for the Institute of Economic Affairs by

Deepak Lal. Lal took issue with ‘The poverty of ‘‘development economics’’’ �what he referred to in a short paper for Finance and Development in the same

year (Lal 1983b) as ‘The misconceptions of ‘‘development economics’’’. In

each case, Lal could not bring himself to lose the scare quotes. Lal argued that

ideas have consequences, and that the bad ideas of development economics

(studies) had led to especially bad consequences. The doctrine of planning had

led to unproductive rent-seeking and the misallocation of scarce resources.

Governments built grandiose projects for political reasons and/or because

they tried to second guess the market. The doctrine of import-substitution

industrialization had opened a door to lame-duck industries and huge balance

of payments problems. The mistaken pursuit of equality had caused

governments to neglect the importance of economic growth. Indians living

out of India were known to work hard and to be entrepreneurial. The same

entrepreneurial classes in India had been crushed by the dirigiste instincts of a

badly informed ruling elite. That elite had condemned India, in the memorable

phrase of Raj Krishna, to a ‘Hindu rate of growth’ of about 1 per cent per

annum per capita.

Lal maintained that these and other bad policies were avoidable. They were

the result of a doctrine of development economics that had turned its back on

the essential truths of orthodox economics. The economies of the Third World

were not substantially different from those elsewhere. Rather, they had been

made different at great social cost. For Lal, the basic propositions of

neoclassical economics hold in poor countries just as they hold in rich

countries. Economic agents, including peasants and other supposed satisficers,

respond rationally to price signals and other incentives. Informal credit

markets enhance the efficiency of institutions in environments of endemic risk.

Free trade benefits producers and consumers alike. Not all countries need to

industrialize. The fruits of economic growth will trickle down as labour

markets tighten. Markets fail, but so do governments and usually to worse

effect: there is no general case ‘to improve the outcomes of a necessarily

imperfect market economy’ (Lal 1983b: 11). In short, there is no case for

developing a separate body of theory to deal with the economic problems of

poorer countries.

Post-developmentalism

Neoliberal thought and policy made a huge impact on economic and social

affairs in the 1980s. This was true in the UK and New Zealand just as it was in

much of the global South following structural adjustment. The success of the



counter-revolution also deepened the impasse in Marxist development

studies.14 The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union

further called into question the case for socialist development strategies.

In some cases, although clearly not in all, the radical critiques of the 1960s

and 1970s were reworked in the light of the post-colonial turn. Post-structural

theories began to affect the humanities and the social sciences (economics

largely excepted) at about the same time that versions of the counter-

revolution were making their mark on public policy. Edward Said published

his famous analysis of Orientalism in 1978. He argued that, ‘without

understanding Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand

the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to

manage � and even produce � the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily,

ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment

period’ (Said 1978: 3). Said developed this insight in light of his reading

of Foucault on power and governmentality. Although he later broke

with Foucault on the importance of universals in practical politics, Said

accepted the importance of ‘unlearning . . . the inherent dominative mode [of

reasoning]’.15

It took some time for these ideas to make their way into development

studies, or the study of development. To the best of my knowledge, the work of

Foucault was first applied in a systematic fashion to a study of ‘discourse and

power in development’ by Arturo Escobar in 1984. Another eleven years

followed before Escobar published his book-length treatment of ‘the making

and unmaking of the Third World’.16 In Encountering Development , Escobar

maintains: (a) that a discourse of development was invented by the United

States and its allies during the Cold War period, and was initiated by President

Harry Truman’s announcement on 20 January 1949 of a ‘fair deal’ for peace-

loving people in the whole world (Escobar 1995: 3); (b) that the prosecution of

development required the ‘‘discovery’ of mass poverty in Africa, Asia and

Latin America’ (ibid.: 21); this discovery in turn sharpened the divisions

between the so-called First and Third Worlds and made experts from the

former responsible for the salvation of the latter; and (c) that the ‘dream’ of

development which emerged after the Second World War:

progressively turned into a nightmare . . . . instead of the kingdom of abundance

promised by theorists and politicians in the 1950s, the discourse and strategy of

development produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impover-

ishment, untold exploitation and oppression. The debt crisis, the Sahelian

famine, increasing poverty, malnutrition, and violence are only the most pathetic

signs of the failure of forty years of development.

(Escobar 1995: 4)

Once again, the possibility of capitalist development in the South is turned

into an impossibility. But there is an important twist here. Gunder Frank

blamed that impossibility on the asymmetries of capitalism. The core exploits



the periphery. Deepak Lal and his colleagues blamed the inefficiencies of

dirigiste capitalism. In contrast, Escobar and his fellow post-developmentalists

voice their opposition to the discourse of development itself. It is the dream of

abundance that now comes under attack. Escobar draws on Foucault and Said

to sketch out what he calls ‘the discourse of development’ and its knowledge-

power effects. But the counter-politics of Encountering Development is

informed at least as much by feminism, cultural theory and environmentalism.

It also mixes insights that could have been taken from Frank and Schumacher.

In the conclusion to his book, Escobar invites the reader to ‘imagine a

postdevelopment era’ (ch. 6). The Third World, Escobar, contends, has been

and still is produced ‘as an effect of the discursive practices of development’ �practices which are ‘linked to an economy of production and desire, but also of

closure, difference and violence’ (ibid.: 214). To imagine a post-development

era is to reject these discursive practices. The unmaking of development will

be ‘slow and painful’, and should not collapse into a veneration of pre-

development ‘traditions’ (ibid.: 215� 17). The task rather, says Escobar, is to

celebrate difference and hybridity. The job of political activity is to carve out

spaces of empowerment where ordinary people can define their lives outside

the imprisoning architecture of developmentalism.

Embeddedness and generalized morality

A third and rather different version of the impossibility theorem was

developed by Jean-Philippe Platteau in a long and challenging paper that

was published in two parts in the Journal of Development Studies in 1994. The

gist of Platteau’s argument is as follows. The World Bank and other leading

development agencies are keen to promote market-based economic reforms

across the developing and post-communist worlds. They subscribe to one

version or another of the mono-economics doctrines promoted by the counter-

revolution in the 1980s. For market economies to work, however, it is first

necessary that the problem of trust is solved. Economic agents need to know

that their contracts will be honoured. The World Bank seems to believe that

the agenda of good governance will suffice to deal with this issue, and can be

made to do so in short order. Platteau disagrees. The first part of his argument

holds that the establishment of legal codes and other

institutions [is] not sufficient to make the market order an effective regulating

device. They need to be actually supported by norms of generalized morality

aimed at fulfilling the following functions: to reduce the enforcement costs

entailed by external sanctioning; to help transform a situation in which recourse

to external sanctions is necessary into one in which a ‘good’ equilibrium (such as

that represented by mutual trust) becomes possible and to guide the society

towards that position.

(Platteau 1994: 535)



The second part of his argument draws on Max Weber and holds that the

formation of generalized morality is exceptional. To date, it has been confined

to post-Tokugawa Japan, and to Western Europe and its settler colony

offshoots. In Japan, the Meiji state used its strong control of the education

system to promote a Japanese version of Confucian ethics that placed emphasis

on loyalty to the Emperor and selfless devotion to the country (ibid.: 791). In

Western Europe, the Christian church and a growing culture of science and

‘reason’ helped to promote a ‘somewhat unique history rooted in a culture of

individualism pervaded by norms of generalized morality’ (ibid.: 770).

Generalized morality denotes a willingness to treat distant strangers on the

same basis that one would treat a member of a kin group, at least in regard to

market-based exchanges. Platteau contends that the formation of generalized

morality happens slowly and is very far from being the norm. It is not a matter,

then, of judging societies that are imbued with limited group moralities against

this exalted standard. Platteau has no difficulty with the difference dimension

of development studies: indeed, he highlights the value of taking place

seriously. At the same time, Platteau is deeply sceptical of the normalization

impulse in development policy. In this case, this is the suggestion that

generalized morality and (thus) good governance can be imposed quickly and

effectively from on high or from outside. In Platteau’s version of the

impossibility theorem, it seems ‘clear that in regions with a bad civic record,

even if formal institutional changes are adequate, history will move slowly and

the efficiency of economic exchanges will improve only over decades’ (ibid.:

804). Overly confident ideologies of development which suggest otherwise are

badly informed or dishonest.

Depoliticizing development

A similar mistrust of hubris is to the fore in a body of work which challenges

the technocratic zeal that is built into most versions of development policy, and

particularly into the construction of development projects.17 A number of

excellent books have emerged in recent years to challenge what their authors

describe as the depoliticization of development. Here I highlight only three.

For many people, the single most interesting book to be published on

development issues in the 1990s was James Ferguson’s account of ‘‘‘develop-

ment’’, depoliticisation and bureaucratic power in Lesotho’ (1994 [1990]).

Ferguson uses Foucault’s work on discourse, power and governmentality to

fashion a seemingly counter-intuitive account of the ways in which develop-

ment projects in Lesotho have failed to reduce rural poverty or promote

agrarian capitalism, but have succeeded in extending bureaucratic state power

into the Lesotho countryside. Ferguson insists this ‘success’ was not

consciously willed by a central agency. It was the result ‘of powerful

constellations of control that were never intended and in some cases never



even recognized, but [which] are all the more effective for being ‘‘subjectless’’ ’

(1994 [1990]: 19). The principal such effect, Ferguson concludes, was that the

technicalization of development � the endless repetition of expensive ‘failed’

development projects � exerted a powerful depoliticizing effect on the ways in

which development could be talked about and planned. The development

industry became the anti-politics machine of the book’s title. Important

questions about the gendered distribution of land and other assets, as well as

about the build-up of bureaucratic state power, were stilled by the noisy talk

which surrounded a mountain of development projects. Power and voice were

transferred to experts, outsiders and well-paid state functionaries, and away

from local farmers and herders.

Ferguson’s remarks on loss of voice, or on etatization , are mirrored in bodies

of work that do not share all of the conclusions of the ‘depoliticization school’.

Robert Chambers and Norman Uphoff have long cautioned that it is difficult

to put the poor first if their voices are drowned out by those of well-paid

‘experts’.18 Many neoliberals would also agree that the over-development of

the state in sub-Saharan Africa has much to do with that region’s dependence

on foreign aid, both in its programme and project modalities. As I suggested

earlier, the impossibility theorems that I am reviewing here are not sealed off

from one another. There is also common ground between Ferguson’s rendition

of the anti-politics machine, and Peter Uvin’s disturbing account of the ways

that the ‘development enterprise’ laid some of the foundations of the genocide

in Rwanda in 1994. Uvin argues that well-meaning development professionals

in Rwanda acted for the best of motives and generally bought into the World

Bank’s depiction of Rwanda as a development success story. By ignoring

questions of power, social exclusion and economic inequality, however, their

actions served to bolster the power of Rwanda’s ruling Hutu elite. They got

used to not being held to account. Alex de Waal has made a not dissimilar

argument about the culpability of the humanitarian industry for the

reproduction of famines in Darfur.19

I want to conclude this section, however, by pointing to two books which

more directly embrace the forms of reasoning that Ferguson deploys in TheAnti-Politics Machine . The first of them, published by John Harriss in 2001,

goes under the title Depoliticizing Development , and focuses on the World Bank

and social capital. The politics of Harriss are more conventionally of the Left

than are those of Ferguson, an observation I shall come back to in the fifth

section. Harriss takes aim at the decision of the World Bank in the mid-1990s

to position the previously obscure and poorly understood notion of social

capital as ‘the missing link’ in development (Harriss 2001: 2, citing Grootaert

1997). He first explains how the World Bank settled upon what he considers to

be the least interesting account of the meaning and significance of social

capital, that of Robert Putnam.20 He then charges that the Bank adopted

Putnam’s work on social networks � itself little more than the idea that ‘It’s

not what you know [that counts] � it’s who you know!’ (ibid.) � for reasons

unbecoming. Putnam’s notion of social capital could in principle be made to fit



with conventional forms of project analysis and measurement. More

importantly, it emphasizes social cooperation and harmony. This allowed the

World Bank, in Harriss’s view, to turn a blind eye to the huge and growing

inequalities in the distribution of the means of power, violence, production and

distribution that ensure the disempowerment of the world’s poorest. ‘Those

who are unwilling to contemplate political challenge to existing structures of

power’, Harriss writes, ‘end up on the wrong side’ (ibid.: 14) and the

possibility of development is undone.

The second book I have in mind was published in 2005 by David Mosse. It

builds on work carried out by Mosse in the 1990s.21 Cultivating Development is

a study of the Indo-British Rainfed Farming Project (IBRFP). This was a

major participatory development-cum-livelihoods project that was set up by

the British and Indian governments in dryland areas of Gujarat, Madhya

Pradesh and Maharashtra, with funding from the UK’s Department for

International Development. Mosse was a consultant to the project. Cultivating

Development presents a rich ethnography of how a well-thought-out develop-

ment project really ‘works’. It is less concerned with state power than The

Anti-Politics Machine, and more focused on the matter of participatory

development. Mosse shows how the community organizers of the IBRFP

were well versed in the ways of participatory development and participatory

rural appraisal (PRA) techniques. In ‘the field’, however, they found it

necessary to reach out to their ‘targets’ (poor households in project villagers)

through the good (or bad) offices of more powerful villagers. Mosse confirms

that it was the most powerful villagers who were quick to learn the languages

of the project. They learned to present themselves as ‘poor’ and were able to

monopolize most of the benefits that the project put on offer. Poorer people

had less time to learn the ways of the IBRFP. They were also mindful that they

depended on better-off farmers for work and forms of social insurance. It

made little sense to challenge the hegemony of the village elite for the sake of a

bee hive or a few days’ work. In the end, then, the IBRFP, for all the

fine intentions that informed its design, helped at the margin to reproduce

and not undermine local structures of power. It offered further proof, we

might conclude, of the impossibility of (‘real’) development through the

project mode.

A brief critical interlude

The first three impossibility theorems dealt with in the previous section would

seem to pose more severe problems for the field of development studies than

does the charge of depoliticization. John Harriss, for example, is calling for the

re-radicalization of development studies, not for its dissolution. In contrast,

Deepak Lal has argued that there is no case for development economics. From

here it is a short step to concluding that orthodox economics can coexist

with area studies: what does development studies add to the mix? Many



post-developmentalists have gone further. Development studies is read as the

controlling ideology of developmentalism. The latter is denounced as violent

and contradictory. It promises the Third World a future that cannot be realized

within a developmental framework. Platteau, for his part, simply but strongly

challenges the presentism of most development policy: the idea that ‘they’ can

be quickly made like ‘us’. Such presentism informed the declaration of the

1960s as the United Nations Development Decade. It also informs the agendas

of structural adjustment and good governance.

But things are not always as they seem. The first two versions of the

impossibility theorem are so starkly posed that their threat to develop-

ment studies is correspondingly weak. The counter-revolution in development

theory has had, and continues to have, significant impacts upon development

policy. A de-romanticization of the state in the ‘Third World’ was long

overdue, and credible arguments can be made in favour of the sorts of

liberalization policies pursued recently in China and India (not that either

country has come close to embracing World Bank orthodoxy).22 There is also

some evidence to suggest that some structural adjustment policies have worked

in some key respects in some countries in sub-Saharan Africa.23 The idea,

however, that economic growth can be trusted to self-regulating market forces

is no longer in vogue. It is widely accepted that markets will work efficiently

only if they are placed in a robust institutional framework and if information

flows are symmetric. Development economics has moved on from the days of

Nurkse, Myrdal, Rosenstein-Radan, Balogh, Prebisch and Singer � Lal’s

targets in 1983. The ‘orthodox economics’ that Lal trumpets must now take on

board the work of ‘heterodox economists’ like Douglas North, Dani Rodrik,

Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz.24 (That said, Jeffrey Sachs admits in his

recent work on The End of Poverty that when he left graduate school he ‘had

not been truly trained to address’ (2005: 89) the issues that would confront him

as an economic advisor in Bolivia or a host of other countries. His experiences

in Latin America persuaded him that history and geography mattered. Later

on, it seems, Sachs was also persuaded that power and politics matter: that the

policy stance of agencies including the World Bank and the International

Monetary Fund are very far from being informed only by economic theory. US

interests also count for a lot � as most students of development could have

told him when he graduated.)25

The challenge posed to development studies by post-developmentalism is

also weak, as several commentaries have shown.26 Escobar’s work of 1995 takes

much the same tack as Lal did in 1983. Development theory and policy is

reduced to a few simple axioms that may or may not have held in full in the

1950s and 1960s. Work by scholars including Lewis and Rostow defines the

development discourse, something that is consistently placed in the singular.27

There is little or no sense that the development community adapts, learns or

moves on. The partiality of this approach is then extended to the ‘dream into

nightmare’ metaphor that structures Encountering Development . Development

is converted to mal-development and its legacies are reduced to famine, debt



and impoverishment. Post-developmentalists refuse to acknowledge that the

Age of Development (1950� 2000) saw improvements in global life expectancy

the likes of which had never been seen before (outside sub-Saharan Africa).

The average person in China and India was living more than twenty years

longer in 2000 than in 1950.28 Nor is there any acknowledgment of the rise of

the newly industrializing countries. The suggestion that less economically

accomplished countries should reject developmentalism is naıve. As David

Lehmann rightly concludes, the post-developmental turn, for all that it keeps

the raw nerve of outrage alive, is, finally, an opportunity lost.29

Platteau’s work is more serious. He is right to challenge the extreme

optimism of large parts of the development industry. His account of economic

and political life in the developing world is informed by years of fieldwork in

sub-Saharan Africa. Some of what he has to say on the operations of the state

there is backed up by the work of eminent Africanists.30 It also resonates with

Robert Bates’ (2001) insightful account of Prosperity and Violence: The Political

Economy of Development. (Bates notes that economic development cannot occur

when the means of violence are decentralized, nor will fragile states promote a

sense of citizenship where elites are able to access global flows of capital and

arms in such a way that they avoid the structures of accountability and voice

that taxation is prone to induce.) In this case, however, the charge that is

brought against development studies is empirical rather than ontological.

Platteau is not concerned with markets or development in the abstract. He

wants to document the speed with which market-support institutions and

reputation mechanisms can be built up to foster the sorts of trust that are

necessary for extended divisions of labour or trade. His critics, of whom Mick

Moore is in the vanguard, have argued that Platteau is too pessimistic for his

own good.31 There is ample evidence, they suggest, that the ‘cultural’ traits to

which Platteau draws attention can be quickly changed if new incentive

structures are put in place. Cultural codes are more malleable than Platteau

implies.

Partha Chatterjee and the fifth impossibility theorem

If I am right so far, the possibility of development studies is more secure than

some critics would like to believe. What matters is the constitution of

development studies and the considerations it makes of power and politics.

Before I review this matter further, however, I want to consider a fifth

challenge to the discipline. I will develop this challenge with particular

reference to the work of Partha Chatterjee, although it is by no means confined

to his writings.

Partha Chatterjee was born in Bengal in 1947. He is a gifted musician and

writer of non-fiction, as well as being a public intellectual in high standing.

Chatterjee has worked for many years at the Centre for Studies in Social

Sciences in Calcutta. More recently he has combined this position with



another in anthropology at Columbia University in New York. His work

overlaps with that of Sudipta Kaviraj, Mahmood Mamdani and Nicholas

Dirks, three of his colleagues at Columbia. I focus on Chatterjee here, then,

not because he is ploughing a lonely furrow � there are many points

of engagement with the intellectual community � but because he poses

in particularly acute form another reading of politics and the possibility of

development studies.32

The treatment of depoliticization in the fourth theorem is largely conducted

in terms of private or institutional will. For Harriss and Ferguson, in their

different ways, the content of development policy has been actively evacuated

of politics by agents of the World Bank and other key lending agencies (or

NGOs). By implication, politics can be restored by an active will, or by

struggles within and around these institutions. For Chatterjee, in contrast, the

depoliticizing agendas of the development industry are more a function of the

deployment of governmentality in the post-colonial world. They are a result of

the particular ways in which civil and political societies have taken shape in

‘most of the world’, and thus of the nature of democratic politics outside the

source areas of Western political theory.

Chatterjee has been writing about politics and economics in Bengal and

India since the time of the Emergency (the suspension of democratic rule in

India in 1975� 7). As we might expect, his work has matured and even shifted

direction over this period, but some common themes can be detected almost

from the start. One such theme is the impossibility of ‘fully western’ forms of

modernity in the ex-colonial world. In Nationalist Thought and the ColonialWorld: A Derivative Discourse (1986), Chatterjee argues that anti-colonial

nationalism in India was forced to adopt both forms of ‘universal’ politics that

valorized the modern (the adoration of Western science and reason that was so

marked in the discourses of Nehru and Ambedkar) and forms of politics that

sought to valorize the difference and intrinsic worth of cultural traits that were

distinctively Indian (so well to the fore in the body and politics of Gandhi).

Colonial forms of rule were at once embraced and resisted, but the forms of

resistance (as, for example, through the mobilization of more homogenized

versions of Hinduism or Islam) were themselves marked by colonial forms of

governmentality. The Census of India required Indians to describe themselves

as straightforwardly Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, and as Brahmin, Vaishya or

Untouchable. As Nicholas Dirks puts it, ‘The colonizer held out modernity as

a promise but at the same time made it the limiting condition of coloniality: the

promise that would never be kept’ (Dirks 2001: 10). The movement from

subject to citizen, then, which was at the heart of the modernist narrative (and

which today is at the heart of development studies) was from the outset

undermined by forms of colonial rule and nationalist resistance that could not

help but valorize the more limited identities of particular groups.

Further, the delivery of India from the British was not accompanied by a

flowering of citizenship, participation or civil society. Chatterjee maintains

that leaders like Gandhi and Nehru were keen to bring the ‘masses’ into the



anti-colonial struggle, but they also wanted to keep a lid on their forms of

involvement. The masses were not to be trusted, at least not until they had

been educated or made modern (certainly for Nehru).33 In any case, the levers

of power in the post-colonial state were seized by small groups of elite Indians

who had learned English and the ways of the colonial power. Notwithstanding

the excellent and expansive Constitution of India that they helped to

promulgate in 1950, these men (and they were overwhelmingly men)

proceeded to govern India almost entirely through structures of rule that

reached back to the Government of India Act of 1935, if not long before.

Chatterjee’s second argument here, as I understand it, is that the contra-

dictions which opened up in post-colonial India � between a language of

universal citizenship and positive discrimination on the basis of caste and

ethnicity; between the five yearly vote and daily disenfranchisement; between a

rhetorical commitment to socialism and the persistence of enormous inequal-

ity; between the world-views of ‘elite’ and ‘vernacular’ Indians � were the

necessary corollaries of two absences in the public life of the new nation. On

the one hand, Chatterjee suggests, colonial rule in India prevented the

emergence of a dominant class of capitalists. A limited bourgeoisie had to press

for the capitalist transformation of the country in alliance with other social

groups. It had to share power with richer farmers, and this group blocked

much needed land reforms. It also had to share power with powerful

bureaucrats who blocked the deregulation of India’s economy. Indeed, it was

the state itself that was required to push through what Chatterjee and Kaviraj,

following Antonio Gramsci, called a slow and molecular ‘passive revolution’

in India, with all the contradictions that this etatist revolution implied.

The Emergency was its Bonapartist moment.34

The second absence has to do with civil society and thus with the political.

It has been a consistent argument of Chatterjee’s more recent writings that the

classic (which is to say Western) orderings of capitalism, nation and civility

were reversed or at least disrupted in the worlds of the colonized.

The story of citizenship in the modern West moves from the institution of civic

rights in civil society to political rights in the fully developed nation-state. Only

then does one enter the relatively recent phase where ‘government from the

social point of view’ seems to take over. In countries of Asia and Africa, however,

the chronological sequence is quite different. There the career of the modern

state has been foreshortened. Technologies of governmentality often pre-date

the nation-state, especially where there has been a long experience of European

colonial rule.

(Chatterjee 2004: 36; see also Mamdani 1996)

The subjects of the colonial powers became formal citizens of the new state at

Independence. In Chatterjee’s view, however, the republican ideals that were

put before them as members of the nationalist struggle were cast aside to make

way for ‘a developmental state which promised to end poverty and back-

wardness by adopting appropriate policies of economic growth and social



reform’ (ibid.: 37). Here is the real and wider source of the depoliticization that

Harriss and others have complained about. Chatterjee sees the origins of

developmentalism in India as growing out of the contradictory impulses of the

nationalist movement in a country imprisoned by colonial forms of govern-

mentality. At Independence, and certainly after the death of Gandhi, the

leadership of that movement substituted planning and a sense of governmental

obligation to named political groups for the messier and ultimately threatening

worlds of democratic struggle. The new ‘citizen’ of India � like citizens in

‘most of the world’ � was constituted as a supplicant or beneficiary of a ruling

elite which sought the endorsement of the citizenry every few years in ‘the

great anonymous performance of citizenship [the vote]’ (ibid.: 18).

Seen from this perspective it is a mistake � it is ‘unscrupulously charitable’

in Chatterjee’s memorable phrase � to dangle before ordinary Indians the

blandishments of participatory development or good governance. Nor does it

make sense to seek the ‘consecration of every non-state organization as the

precious flower of the associative endeavors of free members of civil society’

(ibid.: 39). Civil society is something that emerged in a meaningful way in

Western societies before an age of bureaucratization. In India and ‘most of the

world’, the advantages of civil society are enjoyed only by a ‘closed association

of modern elite groups, sequestered from the wider popular life of the

communities, walled up within enclaves of civic freedom and rational law’

(ibid.: 4). Few people in the ex-colonial world approach figures in authority as

individual citizens who are aware of their rights. Ordinary people instead

inhabit the worlds of political society. Their links to government are asmembers of named populations (of tribals, slum-dwellers, drought-prone

farmers) and through the mediating actions of a political boss � what in India

would be called a dada (powerful political broker/big brother). Slum-dwellers

in Calcutta who are camped illegally on government land still expect the

authorities to provide them with water, electricity and perhaps even schooling.

They offer their votes and muscle to local members of the ruling Communist

Party of India-Marxist (CPM) � those who can get the job done on their

behalf. In Mumbai, similar functions are performed by street-level members of

the ruling Shiv Sena.35 As Putnam might put it, ‘it’s who you know that

matters, not what you know’.

A popular phrase in Brazil holds that: ‘To our enemies, the law; to our

friends, everything!’ (DaMatta 1991 [1978]: 168). This is precisely the

distinction that Chatterjee explores in India and for most of the world.

Chatterjee is arguing, or can be taken to argue, that the impossibility of

development studies resides in its fetishization of concepts (civil society,

untutored participation, generalized morality, decent behaviour, the sanctity of

the law) that have little meaning for ordinary people: those people who are

required to get by in the dirty and complicated worlds of governmentality and

political society. Worse, it demeans the efforts and achievements that these

people might claim for themselves: the poll booths captured by the lower

castes, the electricity lines tapped into, the police officer bribed, the land



illegally occupied, the assumption of state power by ‘rough’ men and women

like Laloo Prasad Yadav or Mayawati.36 In these respects, Chatterjee seems to

be saying, the development industry has been in the business of depoliticizing

the ‘Third World’ in not just one but two respects. The revival by the post-

colonial state of colonial forms of governmentality encouraged the twin

processes of bureaucratization and technicalization. This in turn promoted

planning as the handmaiden of the developmental state. At the same time, the

mistrust of popular politics that was apparent at the time of many nationalist

struggles has helped to slow down the formation of what might be called civil

forms of democratic politics in the post-colonial era. Ordinary people are then

required to make their way in precisely those political societies whose

dissolution is called for, perversely, in the agendas of good governance.

Queuing, complaining, photocopying

Neither development nor development studies has been a major target for

Partha Chatterjee in his many writings. His focus has been on patterns of state

formation, nationalism and governmentality in the post-colonial world. It is

clear, nonetheless, that his work has profound implications for the field of

development studies. In his account of The Politics of the Governed , Chatterjee

develops a perspective on ‘popular politics in most of the world’ that is sharply

at odds with the sanitized worlds of civil society and good governance that are

trumpeted in the development policy literature. In most respects, his is a

deeply unromantic view of the possibility of economic and political ‘progress’

in the developing world. Chatterjee lays emphasis on the false promise of post-

colonial modernity: on the impossibility of the ex-colonized following the path

to development of the ex-colonizer. Unlike Escobar, he is not a prophet of

post-developmentalism. Chatterjee’s work is grounded in that of Gramsci and

Foucault. He is well aware that development cannot be wished away. If he was

minded to offer advice to the development community, it would perhaps be to

guard against false optimism (much like Platteau), and to take the part of the

poor by working with their protectors in political society.37 More likely, he

would urge the development community to leave alone. It is for poorer people

to improve their lives through democratic struggle.

For all its considerable insights, however, there are lacunae in Chatterjee’s

work. One such absence concerns ‘the economy’. Chatterjee is centrally

concerned with how poorer people have to make their way in the world. He is

enormously attentive to their dealings with states that have been govern-

mentalized and which are approached through, and partly constituted in,

political society. He has also written extensively about the passive revolution in

India, and thus by extension on the so-called Hindu rate of growth that took

hold from c. 1965 to 1980. What Chatterjee has not taken on board is the

upturn in India’s economic fortunes since about 1980. Through the 1980s and

1990s the Indian economy grew at an average annual rate of nearly 4 per cent,



adjusted for population growth. This has led to profound debates on the causes

of the upturn, on whether, and if so why, the upturn predated the reforms of

1991 (as it seems to have done) and, crucially, on the poverty-reducing effects

of a higher sustained rate of economic growth.38

This is not the place to review these debates in detail. Suffice it to say that,

while there is little support in the academic community for the Government of

India’s claim that the rate of ‘absolute poverty’ fell from 36 per cent in 1993� 4

to 26 per cent in 1999� 2000, it is clear that headcount rates of poverty have

fallen since 1980 by as much as 15 or 20 percentage points.39 The point I wish

to make here, however, is that Chatterjee, to the best of my knowledge, has

chosen not to intervene in these debates or to take them on board in his recent

writings. And this is not because Chatterjee thinks that political economy

issues can be safely left to economists. The topic of his fourth Leonard

Hastings Schiff Memorial Lecture in 2001 was globalization and the

(in)stability of international financial and capital markets.40 When it comes

to the reform period in India, however, there is a hesitation to write of

neoliberalism except in terms of its ‘unscrupulous gestures’ in respect of civil

society. The partiality and the sequencing of the reform process in India

(which has been very far from a textbook case of neoliberalism in action) have

been largely ignored, and with them the key question of the relationship

between economic growth and poverty alleviation.

To put it another way, Chatterjee is focused on the daily lives of the

governed. He is hugely insightful on the matter of their disempowerment, at

least in respect of civil society and basic human rights. What is silenced is the

relationship over time of different groups of poor people to changing rates and

processes of economic accumulation, both in regard to macroeconomic policy

and through the changing construction of labour markets. Again, this is not a

matter of endorsing official rhetoric about ‘shining India’, ‘outsourced India’

or any other Panglossian view of the Indian economy. Barbara Harriss-White

and Jan Breman are just two of many engaged scholars who continue to paint a

dark picture of the lives of India’s labouring poor.41 My point is that the very

legitimate criticisms that Chatterjee and other subalternists can make of one

part of development studies (the good governance agenda) are rarely

complemented by serious attention to another range of issues that are also at

the heart of that discipline. The post-colonial turn collapses around the

cultural and in some respects ‘the local’. It is sometimes poorly placed to

understand how state formations that took shape after Independence are now

being renegotiated (‘liberalized’), with effects that need careful documentation

and analysis.

A second criticism can be linked to this. At the heart of Chatterjee’s version

of the impossibility theorem there is another stark distinction: not, this time,

between governmentality and the economy, but between political society and

civil society. Chatterjee’s argument presents serious problems for development

theory and policy to the extent that his diagnosis of the thinness of civil society

in most of the world runs true. This distinction reaches back to another that



has run consistently through Chatterjee’s work and that of Sudipta Kaviraj: the

distinction between the lifeworlds of India’s English-speaking elites and the

vernacular lifeworlds of the masses. As many anthropologists have reported,

ordinary people in India can find themselves alienated from the official

languages of state: the languages that are written into the Constitution and

those which reached a dizzying level of technocratic Otherness in the country’s

five year plans.42 When push came to shove, however, as Chatterjee and

Kaviraj have both correctly noted, the rational/formal state in India relied for

its ground-level force on a vast staff of street-level bureaucrats who were

poorly paid and who thought mainly in terms of limited group moralities.

The question is whether Chatterjee and Kaviraj have pushed too hard at the

‘state of neighbourly incomprehension’ that Kaviraj notes of ‘middle-class and

subaltern discourse’ (1991: 53). The distinction is inattentive to the ways in

which civil society in India is slowly being broadened in the incubators of both

political society and the ‘state idea’ (what Hansen calls the idea of the sublime

state).43 In part, this has to do with the agencies of secularization that Andre

Beteille has drawn attention to, and which seem to be neglected by Chatterjee:

the effects of schooling and the media, of attending government hospitals or

clinics and so on.44 It is through these institutions that all but the poorest

people begin to understand the state as something other than an abstraction.

Consider a widow who goes to the post office or Block Development Office in

Jharkhand (eastern India) to collect her pension. She will expect to be kept

waiting in a queuing system that privileges rank over rights. She will expect to

be spoken to roughly by a state official. She might even expect to make a small

payment to one or more official to get what should be hers by right. But she

will also have legitimate expectations of the state. These do not extend to

protection against male violence in the household and may not extend to the

right to work on a government labour creation scheme (for example, the

Employment Assurance Scheme). For help in these areas she must work with

relatives or with brokers in political society. But on the pension she has a sense

of her rights as a citizen, and she will sometimes express herself to a

government official in terms of a language of rights or of civil society. In some

states, too, as for example in Kerala and parts of West Bengal, she or another

younger woman might have gained some experience of participating in village

open meetings within the framework of decentralized local governance

(Panchayati Raj). Certainly, many men will have gained these experiences.45

It is not my intention to suggest that civil society yet rivals political society

as a site for the empowerment or protection of the poor in a country like India.

But the oil and water metaphor is stretched too far by Chatterjee. Even if we

equate civil society with a society of rights as opposed to a realm of free

association, as Chatterjee appears to, there is growing evidence that, in India,

civil society is deepening.46 Consider two developments that generally are not

picked up in these discussions. I have already suggested that we get a sense of

ourselves in relation to others from something as mundane as a queue. Rather

more important, I suspect, but equally under-researched in development



studies is the matter of complaining. The classic discussion in general terms

remains Hirschman’s (1970) account of Exit, Voice and Loyalty. But what do

we know about complaining in more ethnographic terms? Who gets to

complain to whom and when? For what reasons? What motivates the

complaint? How are complaints dealt with?

Recent work in rural eastern India suggests that the quality of the public

education system is a key area for complaint.47 Children and their parents

complain about missing teachers, bad teachers, the lack of books and toilets

(especially for girls) and so on. In some cases they have joined school oversight

committees to express their views. Some of these committees have been

formed spontaneously by parents; most are at the invitation of government

(the Village Education Committees of Bihar and Jharkhand). Many of these

committees function badly. Parents complain of officials taking the side of

parents. Many teachers complain about the lack of education of the parents

approaching them. They see ‘a crowd of lowly people’ and brush them off as

best they can. Many teachers in West Bengal are key local members of the

CPM and hope to escape accountability for this reason. But in some cases the

complaints are loud and consistent. Some teachers do get fired (or beaten).

Some schools are beginning to get repaired. Much more needs to be done, of

course, and much of it with the help of key actors in political society. But it is

through such activities and experiences that a sense of being a citizen is built

up. To the extent that the Government of India can be persuaded to put

significant resources (and parental voice) into the public education (or health)

system, perhaps with help from foreign aid budgets, it will also create a series

of sites where ordinary people might come to see the state in ways they have

not done before. Again, what happens at the local level is intimately bound up

with the design of technologies of rule at the national and state levels.

Water is another area that has galvanized cultures of complaint, particularly

in urban areas. Intricate machineries of complaint collection and registration

have been set up by Metrowater, a state-sector water utility in Chennai with a

publicly stated commitment to professionalism in service delivery. But these

machineries are regularly disrupted at the field level by assistant and junior

engineers, as Karen Coelho has so eloquently shown. ‘People from the slums

were universally portrayed [by the engineers] as ‘‘rough’’ or even ‘‘rogue’’’

(Coelho 2004: 7). They were described as illiterate members of ‘the public’ and

largely resented as such. One field engineer told Coelho that ‘[t]he goal should

be: only if you pay your taxes and charges, you give a complaint. But here

people say ‘‘you are the government, you have to give us service’’. And

the organization gives in to this’ (ibid.: 9). For the middle classes, in contrast,

the shift towards making customers pay for water use has been associated with

the development of a culture of complaint. The same also holds true around

(land) phone lines. Complaining becomes routinized among sections of the

paying public. For those who cannot pay � and Coelho is certainly not

proposing a direct-pay-for-water model � complaints more often have to be

presented collectively through the structures of political society.



Finally, consider the case of the photocopier. The relationships that poorer

people strike with agencies of the state � how they see the state � are

mediated not only by technologies of rule (by being defined as a BPL, for

example: a member of the Below Poverty Line population), but also, in some

cases, by technologies of a seemingly more mundane sort. Rudolf Mrazek

(2002) has written a remarkable book on technology and nationalism in the

Netherlands East Indies. He looks at how identities get formed and re-shaped

in relation to such things as shoes, road-building and the introduction of radios

and radio stations.48 More directly relevant to my concerns here, however, is

the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan (MKSS), a non-governmental organiza-

tion in Rajasthan, India, that is helping many poor Indians re-think their

sightings of the state. In the words of two of its leading figures, the MKSS has

encouraged ‘the people . . . to concretely perceive the links between their

personal lives and the political processes of democratic functioning. They saw

the links between the check dam and the debate over State allocations, the

planning process, and the implementation machinery’ (Roy and Dey 2001: 5,

emphases added).49

The MKSS facilitated these sightings in part by procuring photocopiers.

Photocopying allows for a sighting of the state that is continuous and more or

less permanent. The retrieval of information about government spending

decisions does not depend on impromptu conversations or the memories of

one or two individuals who have coaxed information from government

officials. The MKSS also dramatized its quest for accountability by means

of rural juries armed with little more than microphones and perhaps a video

recorder, as well as by hunger strikes, dharnas (sit-ins) and such innovations as

the Ghotala (scam) Rath Yatra (a play performed in a dharna tent) and the

declaration of pakhand divas (hypocrisy day) and kala divas (black day), both of

which led up to ‘victory day’ when the Panchayat Raj rules were finally

amended. Finally, the MKSS took steps to scale up its campaigns by joining

forces with the National Campaign for the People’s Right to Information

(NCPRI) in New Delhi, and by working actively alongside committed

politicians and journalists, including Kuldip Nayyar and Nikhil Chakravarty.

By this means especially the grassroots campaigns of the MKSS were made to

rub shoulders with demands for open government that were being raised in

metropolitan areas, and which have come to focus on the fourth estate (the

press and media) and the Supreme Court of India and various high courts. As

Lloyd and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph have recently shown, the ‘supreme

court’s judicial activism . . . played a critical role in approximating a framework

of lawfulness and predictability that has had some success in protecting

citizens’ rights, limiting malfeasance and safeguarding environmental and

other public goods’ (2001: 132).50 In all of these ways, civil society in Rajasthan

has been deepened, just as it has been elsewhere in India and in other parts of

‘most of the world’. It has blossomed, moreover, in close relationship with the

political societies that Chatterjee and some others would prefer to see as wholly

distinct arenas.51



The morality of critique

Thus far I have discussed five versions of the impossibility theorem in terms of

their specific accounts of the failings or contradictions, so-called, of

development studies. We have looked at such matters as duo-economics

versus mono-economics, development and post-development, and generalized

versus limited moralities. But there is something else which glues together

various critiques of development and development studies, and that is a

commitment to a particular way of thinking critically, or of placing these

‘failing and contradictions’ against the spotlight of a more perfect state of

affairs. I want to conclude the main part of this essay with a brief exploration

of the forms of critique that have been deployed in these battles. What is it

about development policy (or studies) that so irks a number of contemporary

critics?

The answer to this question goes back to the presumed raison d’etre of

development studies: its simultaneous attachments to difference and normal-

ization. Consider how each of the impossibility theorems deals with this issue.

The counter-revolution and post-developmentalism present a remarkably

common front. Both are hostile to what they see as mainstream development

theory and policy because these doctrines and practices must necessarily

produce social and economic worlds that are wildly imperfect. They are either

dirigiste and inefficient or they are resource-depleting, exploitative and at odds

with truly human desires. The form of critique that is practised here imagines

a world without contradiction � a world of free and fair markets, a world of

harmony in which real needs are met in a spirit of cooperation and

experimentation � and judges existing reality in relation to it. These

judgements are bound to be negative. The great strength of this form of

critique is that it demands that we imagine a better world. The charge of

reformism to which it gives rise, however, is meaningful only to the extent that

these better (indeed, best-case) worlds are achievable. But therein lies a

problem. As many critics have pointed out, the critical edge of perfectibility

doctrines like free-market economics, Marxism or post-developmentalism is

blunted by the impossibility of the dreams of perfection on which they are

based. In all too many cases these doctrines � insofar as they have been put

into play � have led to appalling social consequences.

The three remaining versions of an impossibility theorem are less

committed to perfection and the forms of critique to which this idea gives

rise. It can plausibly be argued that Platteau has placed himself in a tradition of

critique which refuses to make judgements (at any rate, quick and easy

judgements). As I said before, his arguments must be engaged empirically. The

tradition of refusing judgement tends to be associated with positive economics,

and with a defence of the status quo, but it is also common among

anthropologists. Refusing to make overt judgements is often very difficult

and can be commendable. Imagine a liberal anthropologist from the UK trying

to make sense of organizations active on behalf of creationism or intelligent



design in the USA. Straightforward descriptions of these groups (insofar as

descriptions are ever straightforward) can be an effective way of representing

difference and of allowing moral judgements to be made by the respondents

themselves. A generous reading of Platteau might suggest this is what he is

trying to do. His work validates the local knowledge systems that are wrapped

up in limited group moralities. It asks development agencies to respect these

forms of knowledge and not to waste time and effort seeking their

‘amelioration’.

Proponents of the fourth and fifth impossibility theorems are at first

glance harder to link to any one form of critique. This is because they mix

a Leftist version of the anti-reformist critique (this is true of Ferguson and

Harriss for sure, and probably also Chatterjee, no matter that he has moved

some way from his Marxist roots) with more deconstructive forms of

critique. Followers of Foucault tend to have an expansive conception of

power and its effects. Their aim is not necessarily, or even, to suggest ways

forward in the sense of concrete policy alternatives. It is rather to add to

the foment of debate and to put into play new ways of thinking which

might provide resources for some individuals or groups in the constant

jockeying for power and position that promotes the (re)structuring of

everyday life. Critique thus becomes an act of permanent revolution, or

perhaps even a playful decentring of ideas and practices that are taken for

granted. Some criticisms of the very idea (or discourse) of development fall

into this category, if category it is.

What also unites these forms of critique, however, is something like scorn

for development policy interventions that fail to prioritize ‘politics’, ‘the

political’ or ‘democratic struggles in political society’. Here is the source of a

common charge against the World Bank and other agencies � and it is an

important charge. It is vital that students of development are alert to the power

effects of the different forms of governmentality that are put forward as

development policy. John Harriss is right about the inadequacies of social

capital theory.52 Ha-Joon Chang is also right to note that few rich countries

developed on the basis of the ‘good governance’ agendas that are so widely

trumpeted today. Getting relative prices wrong worked to the advantage of

many of them.53 Having said that, it is important that two further points are

taken on board.

First, there is no escape from governmentality or a world of policies.

Development studies does not just look in on the worlds it seeks to describe; it

helps to produce them. It does so, moreover, in the plural. One complaint that

development practitioners might legitimately direct to members of the post-

developmental or neoliberal communities is that they falsely homogenize a

range of development initiatives under the heading of ‘the development

discourse’. Another complaint that would apply to individuals like Esteva and

Prakash (1997), and perhaps also to Escobar, is that they refuse to specify the

costs of their proposals. There is an important ethical issue here. How

legitimate is it to commend strategies of de-linking or spatial closure, say, or of



returning to a ‘culture of the soil’, if the opportunity costs of these actions are

not made clear to those who are expected to heed the call? By the same token,

it can fairly be argued that the utopias of the Left or the Right � communism

or free-market capitalism � carry less moral weight to the extent that their

proponents refuse to consider the likely costs of these regimes, and of the

social upheavals that would be required to get there (assuming the horizon is

not ever receding).54

Second, good practical (indeed political) arguments can be made in favour of

particular development policies that might seem reformist or hopelessly

pragmatic by the light of the depoliticization thesis. It partly depends on how

we think about political strategy and tactics. If we assume: (a) that the world is

not perfect or perfectible, (b) that what is called ‘development’ comes in many

versions and (c) that pro-poor political coalitions are not easily built; and if we

further assume that an actor wants to take the part of the poor in some way

(wishes to judge), then it is not clear that reformist modes of engagement (or

critique) are uncalled for. More positively, while we can agree with Harriss-

White that ‘[d]evelopment policy needs rethinking as that set of political and

institutional forces required to prevail against the obstacles to a democratically

determined accountability’ (2003: 247), it is not obvious: (a) that this take us

very far in generating specific policy initiatives that would address the problem

of corruption, say, in West Bengal or Bihar, or of forcing governments to share

information with poor people in such a way that their citizenship rights are

genuinely deepened; or (b) that the formulation of policies that would address

these issues would look radically different to some parts of the good

governance agenda that have been put into play, and periodically reviewed

and developed, by the Government of India or leading agencies from within

the NGO and international development communities.

There is a parallel here with what Max Weber had in mind when he

spoke about the duties of a person who stands in the service of moral

forces. As Mitchell Dean explains, Weber wanted to prosecute ‘an analytics

of government [that encourages] us to accept a sense of responsibility for

the consequences and effects of thinking and acting in certain ways’ (1999:

36). That sense of responsibility would extend to raising ‘inconvenient facts’

(ibid., citing Weber 1972: 147), and thus to critiquing the conventional

‘techniques, practices and rationalities of government and self-government’

(ibid.: 37), but it would also extend to commending specific forms of

government or self-government that would seek the empowerment of

individuals and groups against ‘specific states of domination’ (ibid.). It is

this specificity, perhaps, that public policy-making ultimately teaches, and

which calls for a less dramatic conception of politics than some academics

feel comfortable with. It also confirms that development studies, in

this case, is not exterior to the world it describes, but is constitutive of

that world.



Conclusion

Development studies is not the only field of knowledge to have been placed

under the microscope recently. There have been important and insightful

investigations into the colonial origins of academic geography and anthro-

pology.55 Nor is development studies alone in formulating policies for

economic growth and poverty alleviation: applied economics serves much

the same purpose in what Escobar calls the ‘more economically accomplished

countries’. In other respects, however, development studies is a special case.

Precisely because of its founding commitments to difference and sameness,

and because of its alleged attachments to an ideology of developmentalism

(Escobar), it attracts the attention of critics concerned about a widening

number of alleged deficiencies. It stands accused of being too political (Lal)

and of being an anti-politics machine (Ferguson); it also stands accused of

being committed to a presentism in development policy-making (Platteau) that

is radically at odds with the Otherness of the post-colonial condition

(Chatterjee). Most of these critics would accept that academic disciplines or

field of knowledge are always artificial in key respects, and are the products of

particular historical circumstances and knowledge-power combinations.

Nevertheless, calls for the dis-invention of geography or anthropology or

economics are voiced less openly or regularly than are calls for the dis-

invention of development studies. The presumption is that geography,

anthropology and economics can be reconstituted, if necessary, as pure

disciplines, or as academic subjects that mix positive analysis with a critical

normative stance. Development studies in contrast cannot escape the dirty

worlds of practical policy-making which lend it a reason for being, and which

render it impotent, apolitical or supportive of a series of interventions that

disempower and even infantilize ‘the poor’.

I have argued throughout this paper that it is of the utmost importance that

development studies faces up to these criticisms. Compared to some other

subjects there seems to be a reluctance for people within the discipline of

development studies to examine the history and present condition of the forms

of knowledge to which they might be committed (knowingly or otherwise). It

might fairly be argued, in addition, that the moral responsibilities of critique or

policy-making are especially acute in development studies, particularly when

people from one part of the world are asking for changes in policy elsewhere.

Work on the moral geographies of relationships between distant strangers is

still in its infancy.56

At the same time, I have sought to argue three further points. First,

development studies cannot reasonably be described as a unitary or un-

changing set of theories or policy-making practices. To reduce development

studies to a singular ideology of development is at once mistaken and

misleading. Like all subjects, development studies has to respond to events and

changes in intellectual fashion. It is absurd to suppose that most people in this



field are committed to the sort of developmentalism that once characterized

the work of Walt Rostow or Arthur Lewis.

Second, it is clear that some of the key intellectual issues of our time � why,

for example, the growth trajectories of East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have

diverged so markedly since the 1950s; whether geography matters more than

institutions in explaining this divergence; why some states ‘fail’ and others do

not; how and why globalization might be linked to changing patterns of

poverty and inequality at different spatial scales; whether economic develop-

ment depletes stocks of natural capital � fall quite naturally into the field of

development studies.57 These issues need to be studied comparatively but also

with proper respect for the differences that place makes (that is, for the

legacies of geography and history). The transcendental claims of market

economics and extreme communitarianism are refused in mainstream develop-

ment studies.

Lastly, the world of policy-making cannot be escaped. It is not inconsistent

to argue strongly for the re-politicization of development studies (in the senses

intended by Ferguson, Harriss and Chatterjee) while also directing attention to

the politics of policy-making and governmentality. The good governance

agenda, for example, has been described as sickly, vacuous and ‘apolitical’, and

it can be all of these things.58 To the man or woman with no land, however, and

no expectation of land reform, it is better than nothing, especially if it increases

voice or accountability or the better delivery of an entitlement. Not all political

battles can be fought in the open or on the high ground, nor should we

discount the slow-burning or recruitment effects of ideas and policies that

expand the public sphere or civil society. Being able to complain effectively is

not as glamorous as taking part in a revolution, but in some cases it can count

for a great deal. It is a sign of the growing maturity of development studies that

this point is widely accepted.

Notes

1 This paper was first presented as an invited lecture to the September 2005 annualconference of the UK’s Development Studies Association. Although it has beenadapted for publication, parts of the article betray their origins as spoken text. I amgrateful to the DSA for the invitation, and to John Harriss, Barbara Harriss-White,Craig Jeffrey, Giles Mohan, Richard Palmer-Jones, Uma Kothari, Satish Kumar, VickyLawson, David Smith and Manoj Srivastava for their comments and questions. I amalso grateful to Maxine Molyneux for her support.2 A hard version of the similarity principle would involve something like the processesof Americanization or Westernization set out by modernization theorists in the 1950s;weaker and more contemporary versions might propose models of late-industrializationor growth-enhancing governance, including those associated with East Asia.3 Given this definition, many of the arguments in this paper will not apply to ‘criticaldevelopment studies’, or that enterprise which uncouples the critical and applied partsof the subject. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that critical developmentstudies 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 sixthsection, ‘The morality of critique’).4 See the next section, ‘Impossibility theorems’; see also Edwards (1989), Esteva(1992), Hall (1992), Mohanty (1988), Parpart (1993), Power (2002), Rist (1997), Slater(1992), Bauer (1991) and Krueger (1974).5 Haberler (1987).6 See Escobar (1995, including back cover blurb by Ashis Nandy); on de-linking, seeEsteva and Prakash (1997).7 The outstanding essay on this is still that by Pletsch (1981), but see also NilsGilman’s (2003) wonderful account of modernization theory in Cold War America; seetoo the essays in Cooper and Packard (1997). On the post-Cold War era, see Simon(1999).8 See Rose (1999) and Dean (1999). For a discussion of technologies of rule in thecontext of the state’s ‘war on poverty’ in eastern India, see Corbridge et al . (2005). ForNigeria, see Watts (2003).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 apostgraduate degree programme � one suitable to people who have already beentrained in economics, political science, sociology or some other subject with a core bodyof ‘theory’.10 Cowen and Shenton (1996: 61). The distinction refers to immanent process versusintended practice. Even if there was no ‘development industry’ there would bedevelopment in the sense of social, economic and political changes that induce a sense ofdislocation or unease, and which need some form of state-sponsored amelioration.11 Gandhi (1997 [1908]), Schumacher (1970), Baran (1973 [1957]) and Frank (1967).Clearly, there are other impossibility theorems than the ones discussed here: the critiqueof development from the perspective of deep ecology is one obvious example.12 Friedman (1957) and Bauer (1974).13 Bauer (1954, 1976), Krueger (1974) and Johnson (1972).14 For the impasse debate, see Booth (1985), Schuurman (1993).15 Said (1978: 28), quoting Raymond Williams (1958: 376). By ‘universals’, he had inmind ideas of justice and human rights in the struggles of the Palestinians and otherdominated groups (Said 1992 [1979]).16 Escobar published significant papers between 1984 and 1995, of course: seeespecially Escobar (1988, 1991).17 For a discussion of high modernist versions of development, see Scott (1998).18 Chambers (1983, 1997) and Uphoff (1996).19 Uvin (1998) and de Waal (1997, 2005 [1989]).20 Putnam et al . (1993) and Putnam (1995); see also Woolcock (1998).21 See Mosse (2001); see also Kumar and Corbridge (2002).22 See Bhagwati (1993) and Krueger (2002), and compare Chandresekhar and Ghosh(2002). For an overview, see Harriss and Corbridge (2003).23 The best review remains that by White (1996).24 North (1990), Rodrik (2006), Sen (2000) and Stiglitz (2003). See also Gray (2000)and of course Polanyi (2001 [1944]). For a more considered review of the history ofdevelopment economics, see Meier (2004).25 Sachs now visits the countries that he advises armed with a ‘checklist’ of questionson such things as the extent of extreme poverty, economic policy, the fiscal framework,cultural barriers to economic development, patterns of governance, geopolitics andphysical geography and human ecology. An example of a checklist is given on p. 84 ofSachs’ 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 thissort.26 Corbridge (1998), Kiely (1999) and Pieterse (2000). Compare Nandy (2003) andSylvester (1999).27 Notably, Lewis (1955) and Rostow (1960).28 The figure for China in 1950 is not robust. We know, however, that life expectancyat birth in China in 1960 was about 47; this figure rose to 70 by 1999. Thecorresponding figures for India are 44 and 63 over the same period of thirty-nine years.For discussion, see Dreze and Sen (2002): 114� 15). Appallingly, the median age ofdeath in sub-Saharan Africa in the early-1990s was just under 5 years (see Sen inFarmer 2003).29 Lehmann (1997).30 Compare with Bayart et al . (1999), Chabol and Daloz (1999), Cooper (2002) andMamdani (1996).31 Moore (1994).32 Chatterjee has also long been a member of the subaltern studies collective ofhistorians and social scientists.33 On Nehru, see Zachariah (2004). Gandhi also had particular ideas on what it wasto be Indian: see Alter (2000).34 This was also the thesis, in large part, of Barrington Moore Jr (1966); see alsoBardhan (1984) and Corbridge and Harriss (2000).35 Hansen (2002).36 Chief Ministers at various points since 1990 in Bihar and Uttar Pradeshrespectively. DaMatta, significantly, refers to ‘the existence [in Brazil of a] . . . doublecode with respect to the relative importance of equality and hierarchy’ (1991 [1978]:168).37 This raises important questions, of course, about which groups one might workwith, and why. Is the proposal that the CPI-M and Shiv Sena be dealt with on an equalbasis? If not, why not? How civil should political society be?38 For key contributions, see Dollar and Kray (2002) and Gupta (1998).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 madebetween the 50th and 55th rounds of the National Sample Survey. On this, see Deatonand Dreze (2002). Poverty declines in the 1980s were substantial and had to do withgovernment anti-poverty programmes and, more importantly, with labour markettightening following the spread of Green Revolution technologies from coastal areas andthe 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 (2003) and Breman (2004).42 For discussion, see Chatterjee (1997a, 1997b), Kaviraj (1991) and Inden (1995).See also the essays in Fuller and Beneı (2001).43 Hansen (2001: 35) distinguishes between an imagination of the state split into‘sublime’ and ‘profane’ dimensions.44 Beteille (1999).45 See Chaudhuri and Heller (2002) and Corbridge (2004). More generally, and incautionary terms, see Mohan and Stokke (2000).46 For further discussion, see Chandhoke (2003) and Jayal (1999).47 Corbridge et al . (2005). See also Bhattacharya (1999) and Deverajan and Shah(2004).48 There are echoes here of Fanon’s (1965) discussion of the Voice of Algeria.49 For further discussion, see Jenkins and Goetz (1999). See also Farrington et al .(2003).



50 It should be noted that Rudolph and Rudolph are fully aware of the enormousbacklog of cases facing the court system in India at the highest levels (765,426 cases inthe Allahabad High Court alone in 1995: Rudolph and Rudolph 2001: 137), and of thefact that judicial activism has often been in response to pressures that first emerged incivil society, and with environmental and human rights activists in particular (as in thecases 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 . (2005: ch. 7).The next section, ‘The morality of critique’, also draws on and partly developsarguments made there in chapter 9. While Glyn, Manoj and Rene are implicated inthese specific arguments, they bear no responsibility for the broader arguments of thispaper.52 Not only is social capital difficult to measure, but it is unclear why it should bemade the independent variable in the World Bank’s model. Many scholars think thatPutnam has causality back to front, or at the very least that ‘social capital’ is one part ofa broader loop of interactive processes. See Tarrow (1996).53 Chang (2002). See also Wade (1990) and Khan (2005). Mushtaq Khan draws auseful distinction between market-enhancing and growth-enhancing good governanceagendas.54 It is a logical error to suppose that a form of critique that shows that ‘capitalism’ isassociated with negative outcomes a, b and c (say unemployment, pollution andinequality) 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, bor c and/or is not damaged by negative outcomes d, e, f and g.55 Livingstone (1992), Driver (2000) and Kuper (1996).56 Corbridge (1993) and Smith (2000).57 Important recent contributions have come from Dasgupta (2001), Firebaugh(2003), Kohli (2004), Rodrik (2006), Rodrik et al . (2004), Sachs et al . (2001), Sternet al . (2005), Wade (2004) and Wolf 2005 [2004], among others.58 Jenkins (2002) and Leftwich (1993). But see also Tendler (1997).

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Stuart Corbridge is Professor of Development Studies at the London School

of Economics and Political Science. Before that he taught at the Universities of

Cambridge, Miami and Syracuse. His most recent book, with Glyn Williams,

Manoj Srivastava and Rene Veron, is Seeing the State: Governance and

Governmentality in India (Cambridge, 2005). He is now working on a history of

development thought.



corbridge the impossibility of development studies

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harvard university

cold war america

yale university

limited group

princeton

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