Rethinking development studies
Juhani Koponen
Development studies was originally conceived in a world very different from ours. It was a world less complicated than ours. Our ideas concerning what development is and what is the proper role of research were different: they were simpler or more confident than they are now. With the development scene fragmenting our ideas about development have also been fragmenting and development studies has lost its fixed co-ordinates. Not only are the results of our development efforts much more mixed than one would have wished, also development thinking has likewise become rather confused. Development is becoming an increasingly contested notion. Simple models having been dissolved, we do not have any widely shared better models of development in sight and we have landed in a somewhat schizophrenic situation.
This is confounded by the fact that the way we regard social research and social knowledge, and the relationship between knowledge and reality has undergone a sea change. In the social sciences, positivism is out while constructivism is in. Nowadays, the constructed nature of social knowledge is increasingly emphasised; that is, it is maintained that social knowledge is not immediately given as a reflection of the world out there, but it is actively constructed in our thinking and our discourse through processes such as conceptualisation and interpretation.
Yet, all these changes notwithstanding, developmentalism – the basic discourse underlying our development efforts - is well and alive and development interventions go on. International institutions are active as ever and the bilateral donors are slowly increasing their appropriations of official development assistance. Their goals may now be fashioned in terms of increase of human capabilities or reduction of poverty rather than modernisation, but the belief in the desirability of the goals and the need for intervention to start a process to achieve them is still there, although this intervention and its mechanisms may now be perceived rather differently.
In this situation, I think we need to rethink our approaches in development studies. So far, development studies has been ideologically committed to what I call the developmentalist complex: the rhizome of ideas, discourses, ways of action, institutions and other structures that has grown around the notion of development during the last 50 years or so. But it has not questioned the underlying premise of developmentalism, the basic idea that a well-meaning and rational planned intervention will lead to a process which will create a desirable state of development in less developed parts of the world.
Such a vague ideological commitment is plainly inadequate now. If we do not quite know what the problem is, or if we do not agree on what development is, the task cannot simply be to produce and disseminate knowledge that is good for ’development’. Substituting ’poverty reduction’ for economic development and modernisation without probing its true meaning only makes it worse. Rather the focus should be on methodological examination of how the developmentalist complex is actually working and what it is producing.
There are many practical tasks ahead. To start with, if I am right that defining development is increasingly becoming a bone of contention and a source of conflict, development studies cannot and should not wash its hands of it. To retain and to regain some of its relevance, development studies must make a much more forceful and nuanced contribution to the discussion of desirable development models. But development studies can hardly afford to embark on endless normative discussions about the right’ content of development. Rather it needs to establish the actual meanings in which the term development is used and to chart shifts in its use. Only after that can it start to put forward questions about the desirability of this or that kind of development.
In other words: if development can no longer be seen as an uncomplicated and intrinsically positive goal, if it ever could. Rather we have to reflect upon different notions of development and their multiple meanings, and to do so not only in our explicitly theoretical discourses but also in our everyday empirical and practice-oriented work. We should not be afraid of the conclusion that sometimes development may be part of the problem rather than of its solution.
But we need to go further into an examination of how development works in practice. We have to acknowledge the continued existence of development intervention, to recognise that development does consist of interventions for processes towards desired goals, and to account for what I call the dual nature of such interventions. That is, development intervention is by its very nature both planned and unplanned, and it commonly has both intended and unintended effects. In our research we should take both these aspects seriously if we wish to understand what happens on the ground. If we neglect either one of them our picture remains lopsided, and we will not be able to realise what must remain the ultimate promise of development studies: to produce knowledge that contributes towards understanding, explaining and somehow, if not directly perhaps indirectly, towards solving development problems
What I would call ‘methodological developmentalism’ will be as interested in intervention as its 'ideological’ predecessor, but its commitment will be to critical reflection of the whole developmentalist complex. It will retain its multidisciplinary ambition, which in fact provides the best case for the continued existence of development studies as an independent body of knowledge. Yet multidisciplinarity also needs to be seriously rethought and transformed more towards what could be called multiperspectivity. By this, I mean an approach which looks at a set of commonly perceived problems from a number of perspectives, be they temporal or spatial or others, and brings these together, fusing and transcending them. Problem-orientation requires such an integrated approach.
On top of all that, we also need to rethink our notions about the ways in which research knowledge can influence development policies and practices. Also in development studies we have to acknowledge the value of some of the major insights concerning the constructed nature of the social reality, and the constitutive role of discourses and interpretations and other cultural artefacts in bringing that reality about. Yet we do not have to buy the idea that there is no social reality beyond the never-ending circles of interpretation and discourses or that there is no way to gain some knowledge of such an ultimate reality. Rather we need to uphold the belief in the possibility of knowledge and continue to develop our multiple methods of achieving it.
In addition, we also have to acknowledge that there is a close nexus between factual and normative statements and we must not be content with solutions which postulate a sharp and unbridgeable break between these two types of statement. Research knowledge should not only affect our cognition but also our values. Development is also a value.
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This is an edited extract from a longer article, published in Tiina Kontinen, ed. Development Intervention. University of Helsinki, 2004.
