As development workers, we are constantly bombarded with a lot of talk about the need for multidisciplinary team approaches to development and for “sharing our paradigms” with other professionals. Many natural scientists even feel uncomfortable with or abhor the social sciences’ jargon, especially with concepts such as “paradigm” and “ideology.” But what is really behind all this talk? This is what I set out to explore here. I will first examine the actual terms and concepts used in this context and then look at what the oracle(s) have had to say about them, actively reacting to what they have had to say. This will be achieved by paraphrasing some of the pertinent literature and by reflecting upon the points being made.

Defining the concepts

Paradigm

Thomas Kuhn (the father of paradigms) speaks of paradigms as schools of thought in the natural and social sciences, as different ways of looking at the same phenomenon.

Paradigm, however, is one of the most imprecise terms used by Kuhn. He used it with more than 20 different meanings in the book in which he introduced the term. For him, a paradigm also provides models that include coherent “traditions,” such as acceptable laws, theories, and applications that have attained consensus from peer practitioners of science. Therefore, what we do in the sciences is simply articulate the phenomena we observe with the theories already acceptable within a given paradigm.

The paradigm tells us what generalizations are acceptable and what will be considered valid and relevant explanations for the good of society. Lastly, it will show what are its ideological implications. Furthermore, paradigms are historical and thus change every time we face a scientific or social revolution with its struggle for a shift to the new paradigm. One would hope we are now in such a period in development work.

Every new generation of scientists is socialized in the new paradigm’s rules of conducting their work. Socialization means the acquisition of knowledge incorporated to prior shared experiences. It is this process of socialization, to a great extent, that does not allow us to escape the ideological grip on our work...

Therefore, the acceptance of a common paradigm and of a specific area of inquiry is the essence of a scientific community, composed of persons who may be different in all other respects. Let us keep this in mind when we discover, later, that multidisciplinary teams do not even share a common paradigm...

A paradigm also carries a view of the role of any given science, discipline, or profession in society. Further, it should prescribe (but does it always...?) that the researcher feel a responsibility for the social impact of the research he/she conducts and for the interpretation of reality coming out of it. Therefore, although it may be flawed, the paradigm presupposes an understanding of the relationships between science and society.

Paradigms operate by dictating prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences, and permissions, thereby modelling our behavior. The paradigm sets us up. Paradigms act as unconscious restrictions we place on the work and research we do. We all have an internal urge to find security that our own work matters, that it conforms to the high standards maintained by the scientific community within the prevailing paradigm.

Tight, established scientific communities have, thus, a relatively unanimous group judgement on professional affairs. Are we then as free as we thought we were? We, in development work, are as much a product of our paradigm(s) as other scientists are and-as I am trying to prove-- of the ideology we espouse...

Working under a paradigm gives us the confidence of being “on the right way,” thus also often pushing us to undertake “work of more precision,” too often, more esoteric and time-consuming.

As in the case of culture, a paradigm provides us with a sense of belonging, identity, and self-worth, thus filling the need to sense an intimate bond with others in a group by virtue of sharing a distinct outlook.

Looking at paradigms from a more radical perspective, the rise, persistence, and fall of paradigms is to be seen as a by-product of the class struggle, because paradigms exist only in mutual, dialectical interaction with socioeconomic and political structures.

A development paradigm?

After considering what has been discussed so far, the unresolved question that remains in our case would then be: Is there a dominant paradigm in development work as we see it in the Western context? And further, is such a paradigm multidisciplinary, or does each contributing discipline have its own paradigm? A dominant development paradigm would imply a shared definition of what affects the group that practices in that field. Note that most of us development workers are yet to be “convened” into such a paradigm.

A missing paradigm in our analysis?

Many of us in development work are already a mixture of natural and social scientists and, therefore, move inside at least two paradigms. Moreover, those among us who are strongly committed to a bottom-up, community-oriented approach in this work wonder if there is such a thing as a “people’s paradigm” or a “community development shared paradigm.” If the answer is yes, would that mean that we need to always search for and integrate this seemingly indispensable people’s paradigm in our work? Would the fact of not having done so for decades be where we have failed most precipitously, explaining why we have so often failed in our efforts to promote and bring about sustainable development? Is considering the integration of this people’s paradigm the basis for a truly democratic approach to development...?

I contend that the discrepancy between our level of analysis and action and that of the beneficiaries (claim holders) of development interventions is part of our paradigms’ limitations that lock us in, consciously or not, most probably because of deep-rooted ideological barriers.

A case in point in the area of food and nutrition was the 1974 World Food Conference in Rome, followed by several more UN summits on the matter. Neither did they politicize the issues as was probably needed-even if they may have unified some elements of the paradigm. Now, everybody accepts that hunger is a social science concept and of social science’s concern, especially when one looks at its economic and socio-political determination and consequences. At the level of concrete actions to tackle the structural causes identified, however, little can be shown as concrete achievements 50 years after the Rome Conference.

A myriad of reports written in these 50 years explicitly mention hunger and malnutrition, but resolving the latter has not been made into an integral part of the solution, because the basic social and human rights injustices at its base have simply not been tackled decisively enough. Verbal commitments fall short; they assume that societies under neoliberalism are universally desired (or desirable). No one has ever explicitly voted for this.

Paradigms and the ruling elites

The trouble with us Western scientists and intellectuals is that while we engage in this never-ending discussion, paradigmatic pronouncements and principles generated by us in the sciences are being taken advantage of on an everyday basis by the pro-status-quo ruling elites who have no real commitments to meaningful change to improve the quality of life of the lot. They, therefore, allocate no or highly insufficient budgets to real development priorities, and to nobody’s big surprise, nothing much improves.

In our lobbying with decision-makers, we too often settle for only a threshold (minimum) consensus—but incremental changes somehow always are taken advantage of by the elites, most often the local bourgeoisie. Attempts at gradual repairs of the system are usually carried out in a token fashion and are sometimes plainly naive. Unfortunately, reality seems to show that ideas born in diplomacy, stressing existing harmony rather than existing conflict (overt or underlying), are flawed and end up leaving things as they are.

Let’s face it: The ruling class in capitalist-dependent countries is not ignorant but rather reactionary. Therefore, little is accidental about the problems of under- and maldevelopment. The search for a consensus with decision makers ultimately impinges on what is ideologically licit or illicit. Therefore, improving the dialogue with them is not possible if the price is ducking the contradictions of the system and the ruling paradigm; deep ideological (class) barriers make a breakthrough unlikely. This inevitability means we need to prepare for some kind of conflict and confrontation. Solving long-standing contradictions and injustices takes a protracted time of negotiations and involves an organized struggle. In the last instance, the biggest aggressor and violator of human rights inherently is the capitalist system—and that denunciation alone has no big publicity interest anymore, and only a few are willing to listen to it.

Multidisciplinarity

A multidisciplinary approach brings together persons with different backgrounds and from different disciplines. At the base of multidisciplinarity is the concept that complex problems have many facets that one or two persons with conventional training in one or two fields cannot handle appropriately. The idea is that the different approaches can be bridged by working on the problems together.

Multidisciplinarity: a panacea in development work?

Multidisciplinarity comes to us “as a natural” in development work when we see that communities have problems of many sorts and we in academia have encircled ourselves in rigid departments.

The problem is that the understanding of what a multidisciplinary approach and its potential are (and who the members of such a team should be) is different for people with different ideological perspectives; it very much depends on how one slices reality into categories and disciplines (e.g., should political scientists be part of multidisciplinary development teams?). Scholars looking at the same problems from different angles often seem to be unable to listen and learn from each other.

A good example that comes to mind is the problem of hunger and malnutrition. It is still basically defined from the disciplinary bias of the scientists: for the agronomist, it is mainly a food supply problem; for the educator, a problem of ignorance; for the demographer, a problem of population pressures; for the planner, it is the lack of coordination; and so forth. Most of these approaches are not wrong, but utterly incomplete or partial, and have eventually led to generalizations that have served to create and spread myths that may, in the end, have the ring of truth about them, simply because they are repeated often enough.

When involved in multidisciplinary work, we are forced to make both individual and collective decisions. We have to decide, for instance, which principles we will take by fiat. The surrounding scientific community will always operate as a base for such a validation (the paradigm here again). The ultimate explanatory principles will thus be heavily ideological in their structure. Therefore, none of our decisions as team members can be made purely on the basis of scientific arguments alone, since it is our own scientific community that dictates that “paradigm-limited-objectivity.”

Multidisciplinarity, as seen in Western development work, thus fosters a purported equilibrium-centered view that often emphasizes constancy in behavior over time. This exposes the fundamental paradox of fostering such a status quo through traditional multidisciplinary approaches. Success in achieving constancy inevitably leads to crisis, more difficult and costly later problems, and more unexpected future events. If multidisciplinary development work just highlights organizational changes rather than structural changes, only parts of the whole rather than the whole problem will be addressed. But if we are to understand the part, we must understand the whole! Multidisciplinarity does not separate the causes of a process that are universal (upstream) from those that are specific only to a subset of situations.

A detailed explanation is not the same as understanding; an explanation is what multidisciplinary teams mostly offer

For a long period, understanding has been sought largely by applying partial facets of knowledge in order to comprehend higher-order phenomena. It is a view dominated by immediate cause/effect determinism, by a quantitative emphasis, and by a paradigm of stability and order.

We can be successful in achieving short-term objectives, but as a consequence of this success, problems sooner or later evolve into qualitatively different ones, pointing to the more structural causes of the original problem. For too many of the last 60+ years in development work, emphasis has been on developing a qualitative understanding, departing from quantitative explanations. Non-judicious application of quantitative techniques leads to an oversimplification of reality and to ahistorical analyses.

Multidisciplinarity also has a tendency to fall into many of the intellectual traps that characterize complex systems, e.g., treating symptoms in isolation or seeking short-term political solutions. This process often involves a set of ameliorative policies, each of which is “rational” for the particular problem it is designed to solve but which, when aggregated, either exacerbate the problems they were designed to solve or create a new set of problems. As development workers, we have the tendency to devise solutions based on a static analysis of a problem, whereas it is the dynamic, time-dependent analysis that is by far the most important.

As our alienation increases, a downward spiral of bad decisions leading to the accumulation of small failures ensues. As system performance declines, the public will look for (and politicians, perhaps even through our advice, will be tempted to offer) simple solutions based purely on gut responses. After all, ideology justifies any particular policy decision made. A conservative ideology—or a liberal one for that matter—often takes the complexity out of the problem. Fragmented policy responses, however, often result in action that is largely symbolic and not very effective in the long run.

Important as it is, providing services to beneficiaries does not, in the aggregate, exhaust the duties that the multidisciplinary development team members ought to have. The public duty of multidisciplinary teams ought to extend beyond the realm of service to the public interest into the realm of service to the common good in pursuit of values and goals that communities value and hold in common.

Moreover, the division of labor in multidisciplinary work has its dangers. It can produce people who stay at the level of knowing nothing but their own discipline, missing all sense of belonging to the larger community of humanity. This actually happens throughout our scientific community, where the payoffs are for performance in a very narrow field and where there are very few payoffs for larger visions, prophetic dreams, and social commitments. How we bring our scientific community to accept responsibility for the consequences of maldevelopment and social inequities is a problem we have not even begun to tackle.

Furthermore, there are very few channels of communication between the multidisciplinary development community and the politically powerful. (Perhaps not so terrible, after all, if our peers are a source of bad advice...) Consequently, the whole apparatus and structure of political power is presently mostly a setting for the making of bad decisions on development issues on the part of the powerful. And the greater the power, the more likely the decisions are to be bad decisions, simply because the organizational structure that surrounds the powerful is designed to prevent them from learning the truth on the ground, and accountability is almost nil, as we see in a bunch of contemporary right-wing leaders. On the other hand, traditional multidisciplinary teams, or their members, advise these groups at the top, seldom taking the consequences of what they have proposed as solutions; it is those rendered poor, the working class, who do.I do not even want here to talk about charity…]

The scholarly community is by no means always right either. It is perfectly capable of giving extremely bad advice to the powerful, especially if they share a conservative (or liberal...?) ideology. In short, interest groups at the top (within the bourgeoisie) invariably find the status quo superior to any “untested” reform.

In multidisciplinary development work, we too often arbitrarily make some implicit assumptions about distributional issues, taking them as given. These assumptions, plus neglecting the political questions underlying a truly distributive development, are not a mere oversight but are rather due to a paradigmatic blind spot, ideological in origin. We inherit these blind spots that become an impediment to our more comprehensive understanding of the development process. Therefore, we will have to take some action to address these blind spots.

The myriad problems at the community level are there for everyone to see. Yet in our development theorizing, we very often appear not to be aware of them or to ignore them. A likely reason for this is that the paradigm(s) of modern development theory have not included the political and distributional factors as relevant to the questions we have asked of reality. The unit of analysis is more often the individual, not the social group or class.

Despite so many references to political factors in economic development, most Western development theory is not equipped to integrate such factors as relevant to its purposes. In liberal political theory, the individual is shorn of his various social and political attributes. Yet, it is not so much the individual who counts, but the group. It is the social class that becomes the main political actor, the historical force. The individual is only a representative of his/her class or else is defined in terms of his/her relationship to the fundamental class struggle of our time.

Conversely, in the Western multidisciplinary setting of development theorizing, we still mostly stay within the general corpus of biological determinist thought, tending to blur the structural (class-bound) causes of underdevelopment. What we need is actually to tackle, not dodge, these central issues. We rather tend to progressively mask basic development issues with technocratic mystifications (think Bill Gates). It is even more: In multidisciplinary work, the interaction between the various disciplinary paradigms actually too often conceals deep causative forces underlying the process of maldevelopment and the implementation of corrective measures. This uncritical attitude also tends to conceal or take as given the socioeconomic realities that emerge from the growing contradictions of capitalism.

This said, the multidisciplinary debate on development must not hide (but so far mostly has...) the political aspects that underlie development. The very concept of development is understood differently depending on whether we look at it from the point of view of the general application of the Western model of development or from a more egalitarian perspective.

Finally, although I may have led the reader to believe otherwise, all the above is not really intended as a blanket denunciation of multidisciplinary work; it just points out that it is not a panacea as a development strategy or an approach to development per se. Multidisciplinary teams should rather provide the forum for the expression and dialectical interaction of paradigmatic and ideological perspectives and contradictions in development work in an environment that does not intentionally or involuntarily suppress any perspective and that, de facto, incorporates the perspectives of the beneficiaries (claim holders).

Ideology

Webster’s defines ideology as visionary theorizing; manner or content of thinking characteristic of an individual or class; intellectual pattern of any culture or movement; and integrated assertions, theories, and aims constituting a politico-social program.

Ideological values and duties that follow from the above definition are imprinted on us through the family, through education, and through the social environment we grow up in. These values are thus not universally shared and are closely bound to our social class extraction. Ideology, as a content of thinking and as an intellectual pattern, reflects the involuntary elements of our behavior that are part of our indelible (class) heritage. On the other hand, ideology as an integrated politico-social program is the result of a voluntary internalization of the values of a given society. It is ideology that ultimately channels our social behavior in predictable directions.

Ideologies are more deeply rooted than paradigms. You can break a paradigm with a series of new discoveries, but not an ideology. (In terms of the origins of our understanding—and no matter how one looks at it—paradigms are ideologically rooted). In our case the dominant “research establishment” assures and promotes its own ideological choices through what it funds, disseminates, and honors. Yet people can eventually change their class status and their ideology. Ideology is not just passive; it is or can be active.

Ideology and legitimacy

As Montessori already understood, societies mold their educational systems to fit the interests and goals of those in control, often with the unfortunate consequence of limiting individuals' development options.

The process of ideological legitimization is the express attempt to put all relevant issues of an epoch within the boundaries of existing, acceptable social values. It is used to rationalize and justify people’s personal and professional goals and interests in society. This legitimacy even allows us to uphold dogmatic traditions with candid ingenuity.

All new scientific development thus necessarily involves a phase of adjustment and conflict that forces its actors to justify (legitimate) their pretensions in ideological terms as determined by the existing array of ideological opportunities to pick from. There actually is something like a market of raw materials to fabricate ideologies. A new field (development included...) always arises in ideological conflict with the environment that will be more or less hostile to it. The importance of ideological change should thus not be minimized, because it is affecting us in development work, and it is these philosophical and attitudinal changes that will ultimately have to be translated into practical changes to be introduced in our work in social and economic development.

Where some see only different paradigms in a struggle in development theory, there invariably are also ideological barriers or differences at play. The decision to opt for one or another paradigm is not only logical—it is heavily ideological as well. If the needed changes in the optic with which we look at problems eventually occur, it will necessarily lead us to focus on a completely new set of problems, especially when we feel old theoretical models are falling behind the empirical evidence coming in.

As long as new theories about underdevelopment and about priorities for the Global South address the task of combating underdevelopment’s consequences and not its causes—or combating either causes or consequences within the capitalist-dependent framework of development as we mostly see it today—these theories will remain ideologically biased, favoring the status quo. They will thus be subject to growing challenge by the proponents of empowering, indigenous, and self-sustaining development. Any attempt to prove the feasibility of solving the problems of underdevelopment in the Global South within the framework of capitalist alternatives is itself highly ideological, because the ideological function of any development work manifests itself primarily through the context in which it is carried out and not through its technical content.

Western development, as an instrument of legitimation of the capitalist mode of production, is accountable for perpetuating the system that generates maldevelopment. It is thus the structural and social context of development work that renders it ideological in character. The priorities finally chosen will invariably express class relations and will lead to a certain (foreseeable) distribution of economic and political power.

We, therefore, need to keep in mind that we ultimately relate to our peers and work counterparts in ideological or sub-ideological terms. We link with the like-minded. Only once we agree on some common ideological bases do the more technical issues (on which we now spend so much time) become relevant and important. Herein lies the challenge.