Titles should never be more intriguing than revealing. That is why the choice of this title requires an upfront clarification. Development nemesis should be understood as righteous indignation or justified resentment with the current trends and quality of the development process in the countries rendered poor.

As a witness of our times, and judging what I see happening in the current development scene --its ideology, its paradigm and ‘not-so-new’ theories, and its models-- I feel compelled to add my own j’accuse to the growing literature in this field. But pointing fingers is the easy part; suggesting new approaches to escape the fate of maldevelopment is what I will also attempt despite the formidable rivals I am aware we have to face. Nothing short of a checkmate to some of the Western development’s pernicious presumptions and misleading prescriptions will do. The story has to be told as it is, not as it has been romanticised.

What will follow, then, is a collected assortment of viewpoints about today’s development --old and new.

As a presenter of viewpoints, I am an indefatigable sifter, sorter and compiler of the writings and ideas of others. I have sorted through the literature in the field of development, have selected topics that are related to this theme and have woven them into arguments that illustrate my nemesis (righteous indignation) with Western development theory and praxis. I present them in a way that I hope is easily understood, aware that we often fail to see painful truths in our uncritical daily lives.

I have organised the text into five sections as follows:

  • Section I. Western development: Past and present, where I analyse some of its too-slow-to-change major assumptions.

  • Section II. Myth and reality in development ideology, paradigms and models, where I explore the doom and irrelevance of dominant old and modern (rehashed?) development theories.

  • Section III. The actors in today’s development drama (or rather farce?), where I take a shot at our liberal development establishment.

  • Section IV. The non-actors in today’s development process, where I provide some new insights into the issues of popular (bottom-up) participation and empowerment; and

  • Section V. Development: The future, where --from a more radical perspective-- I go over what I think is needed to overcome and escape maldevelopment’s trends.

Part I. Western development: Past and present

Western development, as a separate/discrete/identifiable entity, has fuzzy boundaries and is difficult to define in precise terms; its main characteristics will definitively become clearer to the reader as we zero in on its critique.

A critique of outdated development theories and praxis

Despite official hope expressed on all sides, no trend identifiable today, and alarmingly few current programmes or policies offer any real hope of narrowing the growing gap between rich and poor nations and people. On the contrary, everything points to a widening of the gap.

I basically see Western development operating at odds with its original purposes and supposedly generally well-meaning ideals. In short: noble (or not-so-noble?) purposes, grand designs, flawed executions, poor results. Precisely because of that, and because Western development has been so non-egalitarian and biasedly selective, the latter part of the 20th century became a period more of adjustment than of development. Development is about widening people’s options. But Western development has perpetuated poverty precisely by restricting people’s choices and options. Instead of leading to their integration, Western development then resulted in a further marginalisation of those rendered poor.

I have to admit that Western development is easy to criticise. It is also worth criticising, I think. Romanticising it can be fatal. It cannot be ignored, though, that some exceptional individuals and groups have been at work in Western development theorising and practice. It is not these exceptions that are to be criticised, but the lack of quality of the collective effort.

The real tragedy of so much that passes for altruistic activity in Western development is precisely that it seeks a common good by methods which are objectively neither common nor good.

On a more facetious note, Western development is merely the post-colonial form of economic exploitation … now carried out at the request and with the support of the exploited.

For others, Western development has perhaps best succeeded in making social photography. Until now, the rural milieu in the Third World (sorry for using this antiquated concept) has been looked upon with somewhat of a tourist’s optic, often focusing on its soothing folklore in dressed-up images so as to show the most sellable part of underdevelopment.

Plainly speaking, intellectualised old assumptions and theories are simply not working. Western development has produced new oppressive constraints, as well as instruments of violence, by soft-selling capitalism. The state in Third World countries has too often become an instrument of control and repression in favour of internal and external vested interests. We are living in a new economic and political conjuncture of high capitalism, high technology and high militarism.

In such a context, Third World governments are particularly uncomfortable with the language of social responsibility. Their ideas habitually move in channels dug by the dominant individualistic values of their respective societies.

Against this already difficult background, Third World social scientists face an additional major difficulty: The dominant theories of development advanced in the countries rendered rich often further disguise or justify, and therefore perpetuate, the gross social, political and economic inequalities in the Third World. On the other hand, a scientific strategy designed to redress the real causes of these inequalities may be greeted with suspicion and overt hostility by Third World governments and by their ruling elites. The absence of a vocal critical social science in certain countries explains why multidisciplinary research has often tended to be toothless in its recommendations, often calling for ‘more research being needed…’ and seldom clashing with the interests of the powers-that-be.

The masses of the Third World, of course, actually end up being the victims of this international form of development which, with its many glaring contradictions, has placed the world in a path of foreseeable violence. The question is where this violence, born from desperation, is most likely to break out. Perhaps it will come from existing organised citizens' movements or straight from unorganised oppressed groups in the countries kept poor…

Western development simply cannot continue to foster societies that make these masses feel ashamed of their poverty. As a result of subordinating ethics to profit, the breakdown of communities is more a product of the workings of the capitalist marketplace than conservatives have been willing to admit. In its sloganeering, Western development creates a mythology of a society in which there is equal opportunity for all. (…‘Mink coats do not trickle down!’). The underlying assumption is that the economic marketplace will reward merit and endeavour, and those who succeed will be those who deserve to succeed; the only task for the implementers is to remove external constraints to equal opportunity.

But empty anti-poverty slogans are likely to go down the drain with their many predecessors unless real rather than cosmetic changes are implemented. Western development has led to consistently adopting soft solutions when faced with hard choices, the latter reflected in social indicators that march relentlessly to assume menacing proportions.

Western development is skewed and has become an arrogant discipline which not only primarily disregards the plight of those rendered poor but also does not take account of the quality and stocks of natural resources; it has also perpetuated debt and environmental destruction. It has even led us to the absurd in which the debt crisis has now been redefined as the development needed to repay the debt!

Western development is based on the humanist idea of development, i.e., to give an opportunity to grow and to feed, to educate, to heal and to house everyone. The supporters of a humanist development in the 60s were idealists, social scientists and politicians who, in great numbers, were proposing or promising conventional fraternal and egalitarian ways to develop national economies and solve social problems. But tradition and continuity are not the flours from which the social loaf is baked. We simply cannot standardise people, their goals, their ideas and aspirations as much as one cannot exalt economic growth and national development above human growth and local development.

Ever again, Western development workers are, in a sense, reinventing the wheel. They are involved in a leap of intuition that serendipitously leapfrogs ahead using the old (ineffectual) way. It is as if their mono records are revolving on turntables engineered for stereophonic sound.

The problem is that the Western development system, of whatever sophistication and novelty, is actually primarily concerned with treating the symptoms of underdevelopment. Development, on the other hand, is a political issue, and only political action geared to deal with deeper causes underlying mere symptoms can bring about and sustain genuine development-preserving/promoting environments.

The techno-pragmatic response to the resolution of development problems advocated by Western development is very different from an appropriate economic and social response purposefully applied with an equity mentality leading to a less unequal access and utilisation of the fruits of development interventions. In that sense, Western development has stressed action over values or at least has failed to clarify the values implicit in the action(s) promoted. Or, as Octavio Paz (Mexican poet and diplomat 1914-1998) put it, it knows more of prices and of costs than of values, even committing the aberration of looking for the philosophical foundations of development in science.

Equity – defined as equal access for equal need – deals with social justice and with distributional fairness. The policy goal of efficiency, as pursued by Western development, is concerned with matters of allocation rather than with matters of distribution (and, at that, deals with market-based allocation which leads to more inequality…). As a result of such an efficiency focus, ‘selective’ development strategies make impact their primary goal, not equity.

What is needed, thus, is to strike a fair balance between efficiency and equity. Efficiency criteria lead to a market-based allocation of development resources. Cost-efficiency (is it worth doing?) is thus not synonymous with cost-minimisation; neither is it with cost-effectiveness (does it work?) nor with improved technological efficacy (can it work?), as is often mistakenly assumed. Moreover, cost-effective does not mean cheap (e.g., primary health care is cost-effective but not cheap). What we need is more participatory social and less economic cost-benefit analyses to guide the final decisions of our leaders.

To take this idea a step further, consider the following additional facts: In an equity sense, public investment in those rendered poor is more important than taxation in the redistribution of income. At the very minimum, the distribution of development expenditures ought to be less unequal than the prevailing distribution of income. But, as shown by current patterns of expenditure, the needs of the poor most often rank very low in the actual priorities of capitalist-dependent Third World governments. Moreover, and coming as no surprise, there is a clear correlation between bad (regressive) taxation policies enacted by elite-run governments and bad development investment decisions. The explanation does not lie in shortcomings in the analysis by decision-makers but in the workings of deeper political forces and biases guiding decisions in which those rendered poor are notoriously non-actors.

The basic rules for assessing equity are not supposed to change with the level of resources available in a society; limited resources do not justify greater levels of inequity in their disbursement.

In sum, on this issue, Western development’s choice of the changes assumed needed follows an only very partial consideration of inequity and inequality and thus leans towards policy options that fall short of solving the deeply rooted problems of underdevelopment. When efficiency gets stressed over equity, the latter gets less, if any, attention. The efficiency approach thus ends up limiting the governments’ role in embarking on a fairer distribution of societal resources.

In the same vein, one can criticise that Western development focuses too much on the supply of goods and services and too little on access to and utilisation of these services. Goods and services must be acceptable, available to and used by the community they are intended for.

To bring about equity and equality, governments are required to intervene in the inequitable workings of the free market, and this may, at present, be a utopia in most capitalist-dependent Third World countries --more so when under pressure from Western donors and especially creditors.

Perhaps the central fallacy of Western development theorising and praxis stems from considering the LDCs (the underdeveloped members of the world capitalist system) as being just ‘less developed’. They simply are not ‘children’ who will grow up to maturity if given the same ‘medicine’ that Northerners took to grow out of their underdevelopment in the early 20th century!

Euphemisms aside, the interactions that Western development has established with the LDCs are ultimately with a view to extracting benefits from them once their growth (even if unequal) enhances markets for the industrialised countries. The North/South relationship has powerful underlying features in which the bottom line is that the ideological actors from the countries in the North exert the strongest power (and thus impact) on these matters because it is their full commitment and continuous pressure which dictate this one-sided and ultimately exploitative relationship.

As guided by Western preconceptions and conditions, development projects in the periphery more often serve the private sector better than they serve the communal sector. Such conditions seldom allow the distributional impact that these projects purport to have: Western development makes no efforts in distribution-relevant ways. Its funds go to governments that have not spent money on disparity reduction measures themselves and surely have not done so because of “difficulties in applying development theory…”. Official expenditure decisions are the outcome of bargaining between vested interest groups (even the public bureaucracy itself is an interest group) and decision-makers; the latter can neither act in a politically neutral manner nor do they receive unbiased advice. Those rendered poor are conspicuously absent in this bargaining process!

As a result, Western development has, more often than not, fostered an immiserising growth: the prices of goods and labour supplied by the poor to the rich have invariably fallen. Western development has thus, at best, made only minor, exceptional dents in the widespread prevalence of poverty.

As such, Western development has become one more weapon in the arsenal of world politics promoting the status quo. Precisely because it is useful to various Western interests as a tool of control, it will not be abolished without a fight.

Western development reflects all the inadequacies of the capitalist system and of the principles on which it rests. It is fair to say that it has made a bad system even worse. It has promoted naive illusions, and illusions are dangerous given their capacity to lead to cynicism. When false expectations and false hopes are not fulfilled, hypocrisy follows and disappointment becomes an excuse for inaction. Hypocrisy also promotes false consciousness and may lead both hypocrites and their acolytes to be fooled as to what really is taking place. If we are not fooled, we will not have false expectations. We will not think, for example, that present Western development theory can be improved by reforms designed to strengthen it. Any ‘improvements’ will most likely make it a more lethal weapon. In other words, any change, short of a drastic change in its very basic approach, will merely serve to advance the interests of one group over those of another, rather than promoting needed equity.

Third World development as seen by the North

As long as development continues to be treated as a problem ‘over there’, no real progress will be made.

We have to face the painful fact that Western development institutions (most of them in the North) have become decreasingly relevant to any satisfactory resolution of the problems of underdevelopment. They have not succeeded in effectively managing global development, and, even in their eyes, they have been a disappointment.

Realistically speaking, some external financing agencies (please do not call them donors) are plainly ill-suited to pursue equity objectives --period. Although multilateral agencies may be less characterised by inertia than bilateral agencies, they are perhaps more influenced by fashion and faddism in development trends; the spectrum is wide.

In this context, and because so many external financing agencies involved in Western development have had to bend to the interests of the elites, many milder critics have been saying that foreign aid (is it really aid?) is, to put it mildly, fatigued.

Is it the fact that the countries of the North are essentially only interested in preserving the status quo that inevitably defeats all development-aid efforts? What we see when these efforts fail is that proponents and practitioners of Western development tend to blame others (before blaming themselves) or begin to use some meaningless word-juggling so typical of the international mindset in an effort to justify failure. Eventually, such analytical justifications get published in our scientific journals, giving the (false) arguments an aura of immutable truths and authority.

It is precisely the economic order that the Western development approach openly supports that creates and sustains the process that undermines the lives of those rendered poor. Inequalities of wealth and power have always been justified on the grounds of a supposedly meritocratic economic marketplace which allocates rewards according to ability and effort. This line of thinking is obviously not self-evidently true. Take, for example, elections: Elections in so many Third (and First!) World countries --so staunchly supported by the West-- are, for the most part, merely referenda on the status quo, wealth and power taking precedence over ability and effort. And in periods of status quo with low incentives for more radical change, I feel, development practitioners fall prey to the trap. Nietzsche termed the most common form of human stupidity: forgetting what one is (ultimately) trying to do (or achieve).

Despite the fact that some of the unmet needs and violated rights of those rendered poor have become so obvious and palpable, the majority of our responses have remained too complicated; others have been of dubious efficacy in the given context they are applied to, and still others have been purely demagogic so as to collide with the evidence of history. Moreover, the high-level experts (i.e., consultants) Western development has been providing are simply not the appropriate personnel for the low-level organisational and technological needs in the early stages of development.

Western development has actually led to the formation of a club of development specialists controlled by older and established members of the development community --the oligarchs of the development guild (or the lords of poverty?). The goals dictated by perhaps well-meaning Western-development oligarchs clash with the prevailing realities in most underdeveloped countries. These development goals raise expectations that governments cannot fulfil -- and they have only themselves to blame. Development goals for Third World countries somehow call for the sacrifice of their national economies to an international economy that, in turn, does neither protect nor consider them.

Bottom line

Development models based on different, Northern modes of thinking have shaped the strategy of Western development as applied in the world today. And these models have consistently suffered from an ethnographic ignorance or shortsightedness (if not bias) about the systems they want to reform. In order to handle barbarian affairs, you have to know barbarian sentiments: In order to know barbarian sentiments, you have to know barbarian conditions. (Wei Yuan, official of the Imperial Manchu court). We should thus do our homework better --getting first-hand, local inputs and advice – before meddling in other people’s affairs. So many of the troubles around the globe in the at least last eight decades have been due to the deplorable misconceptions of misguided Northern policies towards the Third World.

Hence, by responding to Western expectations, it is actually external forces that impose ‘standards’ on the South. These external forces are exerted in either a subtle, tacit way or in a vociferous, explicit way. Either way, they always somehow end up serving the interests of the haves, and this, at the expense of the interests of those rendered poor. In other words, as these forces maximise wealth, redressing concomitant poverty is left to chance.

Ergo, in spite of wishful thinking, we get more of the same since years have come and gone and the very same external pressures have prevailed; only that, for long now, they have found internal allies in local Third World bourgeoisies.

The costly consequence of these imposed mistaken attitudes and practices has been that they have diverted reformist energies to redress this situation onto the wrong track(s). These reformist strategies are still today doomed to failure because they are mostly founded on a superficial, non-dialectical analysis of the nature of the problems and pressures at hand that led to patch solutions which only scratch the surface of the real underlying causes of maldevelopment.

In sum, Western development, as seen from the North, can be accused of at least two sins: to have misidentified the real problem(s) of underdevelopment and to have used the language of 'community' but its own ethics to impose its private agenda on the societies it has tried to help ‘develop’.

A last word here: The oversold technological approach in Western development

Men of action have often given the advice: Don’t just talk; get out there and do something. Perhaps the best advice for the short term is: Don’t just do something; get out there and talk things over with those you are trying to help.

Technology is inextricably linked to the society in which it is created and used and will be as socially just or unjust as its milieu (Dag Hammarskjold Seminar Declaration, 1988, p. 5).

Despite the above advice, interaction between most implementing bureaucrats and people in Western development schemes has at best been based on a mixture of clientelism and some kind of a supposedly mutual, temporary convenience or benefit.

These development managers in charge are expected to show administrator skills, as well as entrepreneurial skills. In the Western model, these development brokers give crisp, precise instructions as to who is to do what and when. But what is needed is a softer leadership model in which the shepherd follows his flock watchfully as it meanders along the natural contours of the land. He/she carries the weak and collects the strays, for they all have a contribution to make. This style may be inefficient, but it is effective. The whole flock reaches its destination at more or less the same time.

Ethical behaviour somehow seems to be absent from many aspects of Western development management, not because the managers have no ethics (or have the wrong ones), but because their whole strategic approach does not emphasise ethics as being valuable for achievement. Their hard approach deals in objectives, and anyone in the team who raises value issues in that context will often not survive long. Development workers need to feel free to talk about the values and the ethics and politics of what they do if there is any trust to be built in their work with communities.

Third World countries have thus become victims of an industrialised approach to development that manifests itself in the application of alien technologies, is managed like a business or is in line with its interests. In that sense, Western development highlights and epitomises the discrepancy between Northern concepts and Southern realities.

Because it is based on a global paradigm of integration and exclusion, Western development strives to integrate systems and sectors at the expense of excluding peoples and cultures. It is even more so; ignoring the social dimensions of underdevelopment seems indispensable to the peace of mind of Western development practitioners!

The bottom line remains that development is a directional concept defined by the social relations finally adopted. With its pose of neutrality and its armamentarium of surgical-precision tools, Western development ideology and Western aid have actually obscured the structural dynamics of the development process.