The Concept of Development in Contemporary Global Politics 1: Key Concepts in Tension (or 'The Trouble with Holism')

Abstract

‘Seductive and powerful, development is one of the most influential and defining ideas of our time, profoundly structuring socio-economic transformations around the world,’ writes anthropologist Emily T. Yeh. Even so, critiques of development have proliferated during recent decades. What many such critiques have in common is the view that development is heavily – perhaps inescapably – ‘branded’ by its Western origins. Such a view, however, tends to elide too easily the practices, processes and politics through which ‘development’ is enacted and contested, including the way(s) in which development transforms identities and intersubjectivities through its ‘local’ adaptations. Scholars have argued that ‘other modernities’ are neither simply local examples nor enactments of a universal model. By the same token, we should not assume that there is only one meaningful origin, one aim and one monolithic, overarching story of ‘development’. To ‘provincialize Europe’ is also to acknowledge that other centres with their own distinct (e.g. civilizing) missions can be located. Development never simply imposes itself on its subjects without negotiation. If one accepts the premise that the ways in which ‘different groups and governments conceptualise social transformations cannot but affect the policies they adopt to deal with them’, then the study of development should be extended to the analysis of the political and discursive processes which gave rise to both diverging and converging views on development policy. From this perspective, the concept of development may beneficially be re-imagined as a crucial conceptual component in encounters and conflicts among states, international organizations and global networks of non-governmental actors. Inspired by recent approaches to the transnational translation and diffusion of concepts, this panel foregrounds conceptual entanglement as an analytical framework for studying the process through which the concept of development has been negotiated, contested and adapted by different actors in global politics.

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