McNamara's recruits were largely conhneornTTne reseHinruv^ Bank, and their influence on its central activities was limited. There were suggestions from these officials that the Bank might now view more favourably the policies of the Frei government. But this suggestion was counteracted, for example, by the fact that, although McNamara had appeared impressed by Sri Lanka's relative success in improving 'social variables', in practice the Bank joined the IMF in pushing, eventually with success, for the reimposition of orthodox economic policies and the ending of the rice subsidy. In the Bank's economic reports on countries, there was usually a section on poverty, but these were often tacked on at the end, and were extremely short. As before, attention to the problems of poverty was considered to be something that could come later, after the more pressing problems of debt, deficits and inflation had been dealt with. Although, as a Bank official informed me, there were 'some' countries in which poverty was the central issue, the Bank was often more insistent than the IMF on stabilization measures, cuts in public spending and the like. One IMF official commented that he had been summoned to a meeting at the Bank to discuss the demands being made on a particular government. He had expected the Bank to complain that the IMF had been too insistent on cuts. Instead, the Bank officials complained that the IMF was being too lax, and was 'pulling the rug from under our feet'.
The Bank, in insisting on neo-liberal austerity measures and reliance on market mechanisms, was clearly adopting a particular ideological position. The adherents of this ideological position claimed that it served the interests both of capitalism as a whole and of the peoples of the Third World. Both these claims are dubious. The Bank's policies frequently appeared to be biased in favour of the economic self-interest of the governments and corporations that provide the bulk of its funding. There were three fields in which this was particularly cJear. These were the Bank's support for foreign private investment, its demands for import liberalization, and its reaction to the 1982 debt crisis. In the first of these the Bank has been unfailingly faithful to its original statutes, which enjoin it to promote an inflow of foreign private capital. The injunction to promote and facilitate this inflow is repeated ad nauseam in virtually all the Bank's publications and reports. As a senior Indian government official told me, the Bank's general remedy was to increase the role of the private sector, 'especially the foreign private sector': 'the more we moved to a market-oriented system the better off we would be'; it was 'something like a gospel', propounded 'every morning', in India, Algeria and elsewhere, this meant bitter struggles against the Bank's demands for privatization of public sector enterprises and for new investments to be made in the private sector,
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___.     x -------w^imugu piivaic sector; an inaian official in the
Ministry of Steel and Mines told me that the high-pressure salesmanship of foreign companies, and their tactics of bribing (which he said the World Bank cannot do, or does not do), were 100 per cent worse than the World Bank's insistence on imports. He nevertheless added that 'the stultifying of local manufacturing capacity is the greatest disservice done to us by the foreign aid agencies. If IDA stops, that will be the greatest service they can do to us.' In its project financing the Bank normally insists on international competitive bidding for contracts. Although it is rarely accused of corrupt practices, it has been known to manipulate the process so as to favour 'competition' from foreign suppliers. For example, in India the Bank insisted that a road project should be put out to tender not in the usual small sections suitable for local contractors, but as a lump, suitable for foreign bidding. The Bank does not just support the capitalist system in general; it supports the capitalists of the major powers that fund it in particular.
Free trade was another, related, Bank tenet. Its enthusiasm for the benefits of free trade at least equals the institutionalized enthusiasm of the IMF. Together with the IMF, it insists on overall limitations in demand and on devaluation rather than import controls or selective tariff barriers. It is systematically enthusiastic about programmes of import liberalization, supporting them when its friends and ideological soulmates in governments adopt them, as they did in Peru, and urging them elsewhere. Free trade clearly favours established, foreign producers and import liberalization can have devastating effects on local producers and employment, while leading to large increases in imports of luxury products. The Bank in the early 1980s was also strongly advocating the promotion of labour-intensive manufacturing for export. Its arguments in favour of export-led, rather than import-substituting, industrialization would have been more convincing if it were not for recession and increasing protectionism in the already industrialized countries, over which, of course, the Bank had no control. In addition, its favoured export-oriented production, unlike import-substituting manufacturing, relies heavily on very low wages and poor working conditions, achieved through government repression, about which the Bank showed little sign of concern.
Even more stark has been the behaviour of the Bank over foreign debt. The Bank was a leading and enthusiastic member of the lenders' cartel which was formed to ensure that debtors did not default on their debts to the private banks after the 1982 crisis. This was hardly surprising, given the Bank's close relationship with Wall Street, but it was shocking. In the nineteenth century Latin American governments regularly defaulted on their debts. In the late
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twentieth century the major reason why they did not do so was the powerful support the bankers received from their governments, and especially from the World Bank and the IMF. The banks had vaunted the recycling of petrodollars into the 'sinkhole' provided by Third World countries as a triumph of private enterprise. But when the capitalist crisis of the 1970s caused interest rates to be raised to unaffordable levels and threatened defaults and a crash in the banking system, the batiks ran to their governments. These governments, with the assistance of the World Bank and the IMF in their 'dialogues' with debtors, succeeded in transferring the burden of the debt crisis not to the private banks, which according to the ideology were supposed to take risks, not to taxpayers in the countries where the banks were based, nor even to the governing elites of the Third World, but to the poor, who were the ones to suffer most from the cuts, wage freezes, redundancies and privatization of public services imposed by SALs and stand-bys to raise money to service debts.
With the advent of Clausen as president of the World Bank in 1981, its rhetoric changed again. Clausen said he wanted the Bank's image to be closer to the Bank's reality, and set out to prove to the bankers that the Bank had always defended their interests, and that the Bank's wilder critics in Congress, who had accused it of supporting socialism, were wide of the mark. Any lingering doubts that this was so ought to be dispelled by the Bank's continuing efforts to extract debt servicing from countries throughout the world, including countries in Africa where standards of living have been declining since the 1980s. One final piece of evidence is the Bank's systematic hostility to any government attempting to introduce socialist policies, to nationalize or renationalize their industries and resources, or even to engage in redistribu-tive reforms. The Bank had stopped lending in such circumstances to a long list of countries, including Chile, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, Algeria, Peru, Brazil, Egypt and Jamaica, to name a few. Others, including the Soviet Union, eastern European countries, China, Cuba, Angola and Mozambique, have not joined the Bank/IMF, have only recently joined, or have withdrawn. The Bank says that it does lend to countries with left-wing governments, but in every case this is either short-lived, or it is because the Bank hopes to be able to shift their governments towards privatization and free market policies. The Bank and the IMF have of course played this role in eastern Europe, with sometimes devastating consequences. In the early 1980s in Algeria, officials claimed that the Bank's pressures for privatization were less severe than elsewhere because of their determination to resist; but pressures there were, and the direction is always predictable.
The World Bank is finally exposed
The show goes on. As the Financial Times of 25 September 2003 reported from the IMF/World Bank annual meetings in Dubai:
The US-installed Iraqi administrators chose the meetings to announce an experiment in free-market economics so sweeping it suggested a bust of Milton Friedman might be erected in Baghdad to fill the plinth where the statue of Saddam Hussein once stood. Accordingly, the Iraqi ministers were busy with back-toback meetings, with banks, investment advisers and debt restructuring specialists all lining up for a piece of the post-Saddam action.
I did no more research on the World Bank after 1984. But it remains clear that, whatever the latest changes in the rhetoric of the World Bank and the IMF may be, the institutions cannot be reformed. They should be abolished. Large numbers of people, moreover, and not only in the Third World, now know on which side of the barricades the World Bank stands. It has become thoroughly part of a rogues' gallery, linked with the IMF, the WTO and the G8, in campaigns against the exploitation and impoverishment of the peoples of the Third World. The World Bank's stabilization programmes are widely cited throughout the world as major causes of impoverishment and suffering. The World Bank/IMF annual meetings have been so disrupted by protests and demonstrations that, after Berlin and Washington, they have few places left to meet. Rightly so. People's eyes are, 1 hope, opened.
Notes
1 The International Bank for Reconstruction (IBRD) and the International Development Agency (IDA) are commonly known as the World Bank.
2 Flying economy class rather than, as had been expected of me, first class, in order to save the World Bank money, but staying in the best hotel on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro because that was where a World Bank delegation was staying.
3 Perhaps this was because of the Freedom of Information Act, and the fact that some of them were academies on short assignments.
References
Bello, W., D. Kinley and E. Elson(i982) The Development Debacle: The World Bank in
the Philippines, San Francisco, CA: Institute for Food and Development Policy Hayter,T. {196$) French Aid, London: Overseas Development Institute
— (1967) Effective Aid, London: Overseas Development Institute
— (1971) Aid as Imperialism, London: Penguin
— (1981) The Creation of World Poverty, London: Pluto Press
■— (2000) Open Borders: The Case against Immigration Controls, London: Pluto Press
— with C. Watson (1985) Aid: Rhetoric and Reality, London: Pluto Press
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107
Hoffman, M. (1967) 'Effective aid', in Overseas Development Institute, Effective Aid,"
London: Overseas Development Institute Overseas Development Institute (1967) Effective Aid, London: Overseas Development
Institute
Payer, C. (1982) The World Bank. New York: Monthly Review Press USAID (1966) 'Effective Aid', paper presented at Effective Aid conference, London: Overseas Development Institute
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6 I Development studies and the Marxists1
HENRY BERNSTEIN
In British universities in the 1960s and 1970s, the institutionalization of development studies as a distinct field of teaching and research coincided with the rapid growth of Marxist ideas in the social sciences. This chapter considers aspects of development studies and Marxist work over the last forty years or so, including some intrinsic tensions that each brings to their encounters. I try to identify conditions and issues of intellectual production and its practical applications that may be useful to constructing and pursuing the project of a historical, and critical, sociology of knowledge of development studies, which this collection seeks to stimulate.
This essay employs a restrictive or institutional definition of development studies as the kinds of teaching and research done in development studies departments, centres, institutes, and so on, in British universities, as sites of an academic specialism of recent provenance. What justifies it as a specialism in its own right is the presumption that it is dedicated and equipped to generate applied knowledge of practical benefit in the formulation and implementation of development policies and interventions. This is what motivates students to enrol in university development studies programmes (typically with the hope of making careers in development work), and government and other development agencies to fund applied research on development by academics. As 'policy science', development studies is centred on two sets of issues: those of economic growth and how to promote it, and those of poverty and how to overcome it, principally in what is now known as the (global) South. Virtually all intellectual production in the name of development studies, and the claims made for it, can be assimilated to one or other of these over-arching goals, or seeks to link them.
This restrictive sense corresponds roughly to what Cowen and Shenton (1996) identify as the 'intent' to develop - constitutive of development discourses or what they call 'doctrines of development' - by contrast with 'immanent' development. Development studies in the restrictive or institutional sense, founded on such 'intent', eludes definition by any coherent object of study or intellectual paradigm, a problem highlighted by the porousness of its borders: intellectually with the social science disciplines (and the various approaches they contain), in applied work with governments, aid agencies
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and other development organizations. There is much crossing of both types of borders and in both directions, with more and less happy experiences and outcomes for those who make such journeys. In mapping some of the contexts, contours and issues of the career of development studies I use a broad and schematic periodization that posits a founding moment comprising the conjuncture from the end of the Second World War to the institutionalization of development studies in British universities in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by that of the gathering iieo-liberal ascendancy since the 1980s.
The questions I seek to pose, if hardly to answer in any comprehensive or definitive sense, include the following: if development studies in British universities continues to prosper institutionally during this current period of the neo-liberal ascendancy, does it also prosper intellectually when its agenda seems to be set - directly and indirectly - by bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, by state and quasi-state bodies, to a greater extent than in the past?
Development studies I. The founding moment: big issues and big ideas
As a recognized field of teaching and research in British universities, and those in other countries, development studies was a product of the decolonization of most of Asia and Africa from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, and the reorganizations of foreign policy, both political and economic, it generated in the North. Its institutional origins were thus closely linked to the formation and trajectories of agencies, policies and practices of development aid.3 The colonial factor may partly explain the relative absence of the rubric 'development studies' in American universities; the USA had few colonial possessions but substantial historical experience of policy-making and intervention in 'informal empire', notably in Latin America.3
The eentrality of development to the discourses and practices of governments in the conjuncture of decolonization, both North (in foreign policy) and South (in domestic policy), as well as of the major multilateral bodies established at the end of the Second World War (the United Nations, the World Bank), was shaped by the bipolar post-war world of the two superpowers. Their pursuit of influence (or control) in the newly independent states of Asia and Africa incorporated claims of the superiority of their own socio-economic systems, and their paths of development, as models to emulate. Irrespective of the rubric of development studies, for example, American universities produced some of the definitive texts of explicitly cold war development theory, of which Rostow's 'non-communist manifesto' (i960) was emblematic.4 Rostow, like other contemporaries across the political spectrum, had a sharp sense of the historical moment he inhabited, of what was at stake when the victorious war
against fascism had enhanced the political and military strength of die USA (as well as its economic dominance in the capitalist world) and of the USSR (now joined, for the time being, by revolutionary China), thereby contributing to the end of (most of) European colonial empire in Asia and Africa, which both superpowers, for different reasons, wanted to see dismantled.
In effect, the founding moment of development studies was one of world-historical drama, as appreciated by those who shaped the contemporary intellectual frameworlts of the meanings and means of development, and engaged in their contestations. This was a moment, then, of asking big questions and pursuing big ideas, with an expansive intellectual agenda that sought to identify and explain key processes of change in the formation of the modern world and their effects. Among such effects in particular was the striking unevenness of forms and rates of economic growth in different regions and countries at different times, together with social, political and cultural forces associated with them and which may contribute to their explanation. That unevenness, of course, was - as it still is ~ manifested in the brute facts of massive social inequality within and between regions and countries. Key themes of this expansive notion of the study of development, which it often aspires to connect, include: transformations of agrarian societies, patterns of accumulation and industrialization; the formation and functioning of international markets and divisions of labour, and other aspects of a world economy (flows of people, capital, commodities, technologies and ideas, images and practices); the formation and functioning of modem states and of an international state system; the differentiated social agents who, individually and collectively, participate in and struggle over such processes and shape their outcomes.5
Much of this expansive agenda - especially concerning the conditions, mechanisms, nature and effects of development as the transformation of individual countries/ societies - has a rich and diverse intellectual lineage that includes the great founding figures of social science, hence long pre-dates the notion of any distinctive field of development studies.6 Moreover, for intellectual pioneers such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Max Weber, the transformations of their time(s) were being wrought by the development of capitalism and, for Marx, above all industrial capitalism. Marx also had a very strong sense of the global character and consequences of capitalism, albeit one that was relatively little specified or explored in his work. Certainly by the founding moment of development studies, issues of the development of individual poor ('underdeveloped') countries (the first set of themes outlined) were increasingly integrated with consideration of international economic and political conditions of development (the second and third sets of themes),
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which anti-colonial movements did much to impress on the agenda, as did the superpower rivalry of the USA and USSR (providing different examples of the
fourth set of themes).7
Another vital ingredient in the powerful cocktail of this world-historical moment was the complex and compound legacies of European colonialism, and of 'Orientalism' more generally, for the constitution of 'development' as discourse and object of policy in both North and South. This is too large and important a topic to address here, where 1 note only that in the case of Britain (as of some other European countries, notably France and the Netherlands) the experience of colonial administration and of the 'developmental' phase of late colonialism contributed ideas and practices, and also personnel, to the emerging professionalization of development expertise in both national and international organizations (see the chapter by Uma Kothari in this collection).8
In the founding moment of development studies there was an assumption that the state in newly independent (and other poor) countries had a central role in planning and managing economic and social development. Indeed, this assumption held across a very wide range of the political and ideological spectrum, with a particularly marked influence in Britain (as in other countries of northern Europe) of social democratic ideas, associated with structuralist economics (or political economy) and a kind of international Keynesianism applied to issues of aid and trade.9 Consequently both champions and critics of the newly established field of development studies shared an understanding that its rationale was to find ways of assisting state-led development.
While that understanding was a key route across the border with governments and aid agencies, the expansive framework and agenda of the study of development, embracing a plethora of objects of study, research and reflection, overflows the borders with all the social science disciplines, including history, law and the relative newcomer of international relations, hence are not unique to development studies, that even newer kid on the block. Indeed, it may be that in practice the latter is today less well placed to investigate, and produce knowledge of, processes of development in the intellectually expansive sense suggested, for reasons considered later. There are programmes of study and research on development in disciplinary social science departments in British universities, for example in anthropology, economics and politics, hence outside that particular space in the academic division of labour designated as development studies. There is also much research relevant to the study of development by social scientists with particular expertise, including linguistic and other cultural skills, in Asia, Africa and Latin America. They may
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thus be considered 'area studies' specialists in the term used in the American academy, are found mostly in anthropology and history, followed by polities and sociology, among the major social science disciplines, and some of them reject any identification of their work with development studies, for various reasons.
Development studies II. The age of neo-liberalism: how less becomes more, and more less
When the gathering ascendancy of neo-liberalism in development policy from the 1980s - the Washington Consensus - repudiated any significant interventionist role of states in the South in bringing about economic development, the question therefore arose as to whether development studies retained any purpose.10 The question made sense. Development studies has not only survived the current period of neo-liberal ascendancy, however, but has prospered in British universities in terms of continued institutional growth.11 An important, very general, part of the explanation for this is that neo-liberalism cannot write the state out of the script of contemporary capitalism, nor does it wish to do so (despite the usual excesses of political rhetoric), and certainly not in the realm of foreign, including aid, policy. In the North, the political course of neo-liberalism as a programme of state reform by various means of squeezing and splitting the state, in the terms used by Mackintosh (1992), combines redefinition of what states should and can do (less welfare, more 'security', for example) with attempts to re-engineer the ways in which they do it, rather than any diminution of the overall scope of state activity and the resources it commands. In the South the drive to 'roll back the state' was devised and is pursued by Northern governments through their bilateral aid programmes and collectively through multilateral agencies, above all the World Bank, which has established a unique ideological and inteflectual hegemony in development policy discourse in the last twenty years or so.
The paradox is that less intervention in theory has meant more intervention in practice. The major shifts of development theory, policy discourse and design, and modalities of intervention in the period of neo-liberal ascendancy, spearheaded by the World Bank, require a great deal of work to replace what preceded them in the period of state-led development12 And the intellectual and political labour of deconstruction requires a greater practical labour of reconstruction, from the demands of legitimization by intellectual and technical expertise - including, not least, presenting claims to better results of neo-liberal policies - to the nuts and bolts of reforming particular institutions and practices.
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After a brief initial moment of market triumphalism in tfie early 1980s (get the prices right and all else will follow: growth, prosperity and stability), it became evident that a few decisive strokes of policy to roll back states and liberate markets were not enough to achieve accelerated economic growth and reduce poverty. Matters were not as straightforward as they might have seemed, and here the first paradox meets another, whereby apparently less becomes substantially more. Freeing the market to cany out the tasks of economic growth for which it is deemed uniquely suited rapidly escalated into an extraordinarily ambitious, or grandiose, project of social engineering that amounts to establishing bourgeois civilization on a global scale. Comprehensive market reform confronted similarly comprehensive state reform (rather than simply contraction) as a condition of the former; in turn, the pursuit of 'good governance' quickly extended to, and embraced, notions of 'civil society' and social institutions more generally. In short, the terrain of development discourse and the range of aid-funded interventions have become ever more inclusive to encompass the reshaping, or transformation, of political and social (and, by implication, cultural) as well as economic institutions and practices.
Bourgeois civilization comes as a complete package," and completing it requires filling many gaps left by displacement of the framework of earlier state-led development, in which public investment and a state economic sector were central to economic growth, and employment generation, strong provision of public goods and redistributionist measures were central to connecting economic growth and the elimination of poverty (Seers 1969). In conceptual terms, the gap left by public investment in economic infrastructure and enterprise was to be filled by the structures of incentives and competitive pressures to efficiency provided by properly functioning markets and their price signals. In practical terms - and until such time as markets are able to provide - political considerations recommended tryingto fill two of the major welfare gaps left by 'squeezing1 and 'splitting' the state, namely losses in 'formal' employment and deteriorating provision of such strategic public goods as healthcare and education. These areas (and especially the latter), along with others bearing on livelihoods and basic needs, have been increasingly allocated to alternative provision through 'civil society', in practice NGOs (nongovernment organizations). As amply documented, and widely debated, recent decades have witnessed an explosive proliferation of development NGOs. They constitute an extensive international network - or hierarchy - through which a significant proportion of aid funding is disbursed, most of it in the first place through large international (Northern) NGOs acting as subcontractors to aid agencies.
" Finally, two other aspects of the ever expanding agenda of development studies can be noted briefly. The first is the absorption and impact, however uneven and incomplete, of over-arching areas of concern of different kinds generated by wider intellectual and political currents, of which issues of gender (from the 1960s) and of the natural environment (from the 1970s) provide the most potent examples (see the chapters by Ruth Pearson and Admos Chim-howu and Philip Woodhouse in this collection). The second is that the demise of the USSR opened up a potentially vast new frontier to development studies from the early 1990s. Those with credentials in the many areas of applied research embraced by the pursuit of structural adjustment in Asia, Africa and Latin America were now able to stake claims to assist the course of market liberalization, state reform and good governance across the former Soviet bloc from the Baltic to the expanses of Central Asia.
The scope of development studies has thus expanded greatly, and it has done so, as implied by the above observations, principally by agglomeration. To what may be considered its constant topics - for example, in international economics (trade, investment and today - above all? - capital markets), macroeconomics (exchange, interest, inflation and savings rates, employment, productivity) and social policy (health, education) - are added state reform, the (re)design and management of public institutions, democratization, civil society and the sources of social capital, new social movements, small-scale credit, NGO management, (environmentally) sustainable development, women/gender and development, children and development, refugees and development, humanitarian emergencies and interventions, and post-conflict resolution (among other examples). What has been largely abandoned from the earlier agenda of the founding moment of development studies is that central attention to issues of economic planning, public investment and accumulation, together with the expansive conceptions of public goods with which they were then associated.14
If development studies in British universities prospers institutionally, does it also prosper intellectually during this period of the neo-liberal ascendancy when its agenda is set - directly and indirectly - by bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, by state and quasi-state bodies, to a greater extent than in the past? An adequate answer to this question would be long and complex, exceeding the limits of space available (and the competence of the author, given the ever expanding terrain of development studies and its proliferating specialized subdivisions). Here, as throughout this chapter, I suggest only some elements of an answer, broadly sketched.
One must recognize, to begin, that there is always a tension between
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scholarship in social science and its appropriations by and for policy." How policy works in practice is shaped much more by political forces and processes than by the intrinsic merits of different intellectual paradigms and positions and their contestations (a rationalist fallacy to which intellectuals are prone). One of the constant intellectual tensions of development studies, then, is between its institutional identity and practical mission on one hand, and the expansive sense of the study of development as one of the definitive themes established by the classic origins of modern social science on the other hand. And, as noted, important contributions to the latter continue to be made outside the rubric of development studies, sometimes in intellectual and/or ideological opposition to the latter qua 'policy science'.
Tensions between scholarship, with its exacting disciplines (including the time it takes), and knowledge required, and packaged, for the practical purposes of policy design and implementation, do not amount to an unbridgeable divide between the two endeavours. Such tensions can produce more or less creative effects, depending on broader political and ideological conditions of intellectual production and the specific political complexions and purposes of those who commission or otherwise promote particular kinds of applied knowledge. In an ideal world, the rich intellectual resources for the study of development (in the expansive sense) would be available to the mission of development studies (in the restrictive sense), and systematically assimilated and assessed by the latter to inform its work of devising effective development policy and practice. It seems to me that this kind of tension was more creative in the founding moment of development studies than it is today, when the stretching of the agenda of development discourse to near-omniverous proportions is driven by pressure to bridge the yawning gaps between now conventionalized formulae for market-led economic growth and evidence of growing social inequality and poverty in the South.
For example, one of the constitutive elements of the intellectual agenda of the study of development in its expansive sense is the (variant) relationships between different economic structures and patterns of growth in different places and times in the formation of a modern world economy and the reduction or reproduction of poverty, as an aspect of social inequality intrinsic to and produced by capitalist development. This concern was also more evident in the founding moment of development studies, characterized by a more diverse and dynamic intellectual and ideological conjuncture, not least due to the influence and impact of Marxist ideas (see below). The key questions of development strategy were framed within serious attempts, from different viewpoints and yielding different interpretations, to understand the massive
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upheavals that created the contemporary world and continued to shape it.5S This is now displaced by such notions as 'pro-poor growth', which expresses nicely the commitment of contemporary development discourse and doctrine to 'win-win' solutions and its faith that an inclusive - and globalizing - market economy (or more broadly bourgeois civilization) contains no intrinsic obstacles to a better life for all. There is so much to gain with relatively little pain; the only losers will be rent-seekers and others who fail to play by the rules of the game.1*
The commitment to 'win-win' policy solutions to continuing problems of economic growth and poverty imposes one kind of constraint on the intellectual spaces of development studies. It is the credo ofwhat Ferguson (1990) memorably termed an 'anti-politics machine' that 'depoliticizes' development doctrine (see also Harriss 2001), and marginalizes or displaces investigation and understanding of the sources, dynamics and effects of typically savage social inequality in the South, and of no less savage relations of power and inequality in the international economic and political system. It elides consideration of the often violent social upheavals and struggles that characterize the processes and outcomes of the development of capitalism.
Another type of constraint on intellectual work in development studies stems from the hegemonism of neo-classical economics, which has spiralled during the neo-Hberal ascendancy, including the latest manifestations of its ambition to subsume much of sociological and political enquiry within its own paradigm (Fine 1997, 2001). This is as good an example as aiiy of a theoretical model achieving supremacy as a world view, and global programme, owing to political and ideological conditions rather than intrinsic intellectual superiority. And neo-classical economics provides intellectual support, with more or less plausibility, to the good intentions of the 'win-win' discourse of development policy.
There may be positive aspects of the agglomeration of topics assimilated to the rubric of development studies, if not of the loss of some of the classic-issues of development strategy of the previous period. What has also been lost to a considerable degree is the wider intellectual, and political, understanding of development as a process of struggle and conflict, and use of the diverse intellectual resources available to advance such understanding.17 The expansion of topic range (and policy objects) is not the same as intellectual vitality and depth, or indeed pluralism, all of which, I suggest, have diminished for the reasons indicated. Such observations about the narrowing intellectual horizons, and more shallow intellectual base, of development studies - how more becomes less - will not meet with general agreement, of course, and
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require testing by more detailed, and empirical, investigation of its 'output', as well as by the normal course of debate.
The same applies to observations about connections between intellectual practices, and their shifting conditions, and the intellectual skills, experiences and career paths of those who work in development studies - an occupational sociology of the field, as it were. This bears on the key political (and existential) issue of the 'room for manoeuvre' - that is, of the positioning and practices, collective and individual, of those critical of the dominant ideological tendencies of development doctrine and of the powerful forces that promote them. This is a matter of the spaces available, or which can be 'captured' or created, within the discursive and practical fields of dominant development agencies (and not least their funding practices) to articulate, and implement, alternative ideas and courses of action. In turn, questions of such 'room for manoeuvre' connect with how notions of the tasks of intellectual and applied work are constituted, the capacities they are deemed to require, and of how to combine them.18
'Practitioners' have been present in development studies from its inception, across a spectrum from the former colonial administrators noted earlier (whose intellectual contribution was so limited) to architects of national development strategies and plans. The demand for practitioners has increased, however, along with the expanded range of development studies, and the political and institutional pressures that contribute to this agglomeration. Here are several examples. The first is neo-classical economists who are mathematically well endowed but somewhat challenged in terms of broader intellectual culture, both qualities that commend them for applied work in the 'hard' areas of macro- and microeconomic modelling and policy design. A second example is practitioners of public administration, required to deal with the many nuts-and-bolts aspects of comprehensive state reform, civil service restructuring and (re)training, decentralization, and other re-engineering of public institutions in the name of 'good governance'. A third is those recruited for, and aimed at, the 'soft' areas of welfare, community-level and other self-help interventions where NGO activity concentrates and the jargon of 'participation', 'empowerment', 'stakeholders' and the like is most pervasive.111 Of these examples, only the first requires an academic formation of any intellectual presumption and rigour (within its very narrow culture), primarily the acquisition of a well-established analytical 'tool kit'.
The point of these examples is not to (pre-)judge the ethics, intentions or professional competence of such categories of practitioners which, one might reasonably expect, follow a (notionally) normal distribution across development
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studies as in any other comparable field of'policy science'. Rather, it is to pose the question of the effects for the intellectual terrain of development studies of the neo-Iiberal hegemony of development discourse, and of its practical manifestation in the demand of aid agencies for expert advice across the spectrum of their policy concerns (from 'hard' to 'soft'), and by their willingness to contract some of that expertise from universities.20 Part of the answer, I suggest - and one which also calls for more systematic empirical research - is that, in the circumstances sketched, efforts to identify and exploit 'room for manoeuvre', and the outcomes of such efforts, are more a matter of professional skill than intellectual position or substance, and especially skill in the institutional politics of aid agencies, which includes, of course, talking tlie(ir) talk. 'Practitioners' have to be seen, above all, as competent technicians, in the 'soft' as well as 'hard' areas of development policy and practice. And for this, their training, capacities and interests in development in the intellectually expansive sense proposed above are generally irrelevant and in some (many?) instances are no doubt best concealed in order for them to pass as competent technicians.
And the Marxists?!. Political struggle and intellectual dynamism
The history of Marxist ideas is as complex as those of the other great lineages of social theory that contribute to the study and understanding of development in its intellectually expansive sense, and perhaps more so. The reason is that it comprises at least three strands, each stamped with their own tensions and contradictions, as are the various ways in which they intertwine, namely those of Marxist intellectual work (and its specific social and political conditions in different times and places); of political parties and movements that contest the social order of capitalism and imperialism and seek to replace it with a Marxian version of socialism (and eventually communism); and of states that attempted to construct and pursue a project of socialist construction as a mode of development alternative, and superior, to capitalism - or claimed to do so.
All these strands, and their various effects for each other, were evident with particular dynamism and intensity in the 1960s and 1970s, which saw a massive increase of interest in, and influence of, Marxist ideas in British universities, as elsewhere, as part of the formation of a 'New Left'. In terms of intellectual resources, both reflecting and stimulating this interest were the first English translations of important texts, including some by Marx, especially the first full translation of the Grundrisse; notable editions of Gramsci's writings; texts by leading protagonists of the Bolshevik debates of the 1920s, for example Preobrazhensky and Bukharin; and, in addition to the official Selected
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Works, writings of Mao Zedong then appeared in new editions of translation and commentary. The efflorescence of Marxist intellectual work and debate added university-based journals such as Antipode, Capital and Class, Critique of Anthropology, History Workshop, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Peasant Studies, Race and Class, Radical Sociology, Review of African Political Economy and Review of Radical Political Economy to existing independent Marxist journals such as Monthly Review and Science and Society in the USA and New Left Review in Britain. In the 1960s New Left Review soon made explicit its mission to translate and explore contemporary, as well as earlier, Marxist texts and debates - notably from France, Germany and Italy - to provide Marxist intellectual work with theoretical foundations lacking in the inheritance of British (and more generally anglophone) 'empiricism'.
This intellectual ferment was, of course, intimately tied to the political events of its time and the concerns they generated. One preoccupation was the effort to understand better the problems and prospects of economic and social development of poorer countries, only recently independent of colonial rule in most of Asia and Africa, with particular attention to (i) how their processes of accumulation were shaped by their internal social structures and associated forms of state, (ii) their locations in the social divisions of labour of a capitalist world economy - an 'imperialism (now) without colonies' - and (iii) how international and domestic class forces interacted. This expansive intellectual agenda included a commitment to exploring and testing the possible contributions to such understanding of knowledge of pre-capitalist social formations in different parts of the world; of paths of capitalist transition in the now developed countries of the North; and of Latin American, Asian and African experiences of colonialism and their legacies forsubsequentprocesses of development/underdevelopment. All these became major themes in Marxist (and Marxisanť) theoretical and historical work, with the first and third also central to the remarkable flowering of Marxist work in anthropology, and the second and third to an intellectually expansive, and historically minded, political economy of development.
If much of the focus noted was on the development of capitalism and its prospects in the South, this was also intimately linked to the Marxist left's concerns with anti-imperialism and transitions to socialism. Two of the defining global moments of the 1960s and early 1970s were the Vietnamese war of national liberation against US imperialism21 and the 'Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution' (GPCR) and its aftermath in China. While international progressive support for the former was unanimous, comprehending the baffling course of the latter, and analysing its effects, generated (or further
provoked) a range of sharp and symptomatic disagreements among Marxists about the conditions, strategies and prospects of socialist development in poor countries. Of course, casting its long shadow over those disagreements was the first and fateful experience of social revolution and draft industrialization in a mostly agrarian society, that of Russia/the USSR.
In this context marked by anti-imperialist struggles, by the increasingly evident difficulties of capitalist development in poor countries, and by scepticism about the USSR and communist parties across the world that were aligned with it (a distinguishing feature of the New Left),22 it was probably above all the claims of Maoism - as political philosophy and model of development alternative to both capitalism and Soviet state socialism - which influenced Marxist intellectuals by both acclaim and rejection. Whether those claims amounted to filling gaps in 'classic' Marxism or to its fundamental (and fatal) revision - in the direction of 'Third Worldism', the absorption of anti-imperialism by nationalism, peasants (and lutnpenproletarians) rather than the organized working class as the revolutionary force of the current epoch, and so on23 - demanded attention and response across a wide terrain of analytical, empirical and political issues.24 The moment of Maoism, as that of'Third Worldism' more generally, certainly had the merit of forcing attention on two of the most problematic ideological currents that had long haunted Marxism in the real worlds of politics it has grappled with, not least by infiltrating the programmes and practices of Marxist parties and movements, namely nationalism and populism.
Two texts from the large corpus of (British) Marxist writing of this conjuncture illustrate its extreme diversity of approaches to and arguments about development. The better known is Bill Warren's highly contentious Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism (1980), published posthumously from drafts edited by Warren's former student John Sender. This may be regarded as a restatement of a classic Marxist view that the (full) development of capitalism across the globe is a necessary precondition of any project of socialist construction. By this token capitalism is a progressive force, the seeds of which were first planted in the South by colonial imperialism. While Warren's empirical argument sought to document the actuality of capitalist development, and its benefits, his book was more notorious for its polemical fire. This was directed against positions (sometimes claiming the heritage of Lenin's Imperialism) that denied the possibility of capitalist development (accumulation, industrialization, development of" the productive forces) in the South, notably the 'development of underdevelopment' and dependency theories influential at the time, and against those nationalist and populist - and self-
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styled 'socialist' - currents in development pojicyin tmrsounraiai. urot^a the contributions of international capital.
By way of contrast, Social Construction and Marxist Theory: Bolshevism and Its Critique by Philip Corrigan, Harvey Ramsay and Derek Sayer (1978) presented a serious and sustained intellectual argument for Maoism.25 Its subtitle indicates its purpose, which was to liberate socialist theory (and practice) from what its authors regarded as that aspect of classic Marxism which privileged the development of the productive forces above mass politics, and was incorporated in Bolshevism: an index of its incomplete break with bourgeois ideas and of the troubled path of Soviet state socialism. In turn, mass politics and its forms of inclusive and dynamic participation, as theorized by Mao Zedong and epitomized by the GPCR in China, generated forms of development centred on satisfying basic needs through creative collective practices.
While, as ever, they bear the hallmarks of their specific moment of production, the contrast between these two works echoes long-standing tensions in the Marxist tradition. One such tension centres on interpretations of the relationship between, and relative emphasis on, the productive forces (the means of producing wealth) and their unique development in capitalism, and the social relations of production or class relations (the basis of politics). Another tension is inherent in Marx's famous observation (1976: 91) that 'The country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed the image of its own future' - if this is taken to mean that the latter are destined to advance to the same kind (or stage) of capitalist economic development through incorporation in a global capitalist economy shaped (and dominated) by the former. This view was embraced by Warren (above) and rejected by many other Marxists, as well as by many nationalists and populists in the South together with their Northern sympathizers. A somewhat different tension, on an existential as well as intellectual plane, concerns the conditions, purposes and effects of Marxist intellectual work in relation to contemporary political dynamics and struggles with all their contradictory impulses and the sheer messiness of what I term real-world politics, a matter to which 1 return. And, connecting in different ways with all these, is that pervasive tension at the core of any socialist or communist project between realism and utopianism, between the claims of Marxism as a science of social reality and a programme of human emancipation.
While these kinds of tensions (and many others) permeated Marxist intellectual debate on the general terrain of arguments about capitalism and socialism, and imperialism and development, as well as informing widely divergent political positions on contemporary events, how - and how much - did they connect with the concerns of development studies in its founding moment,
12,4
—aescnned earlier? Here are several, once more preliminary or provisional, observations. First, the seemingly inexhaustible firepower of Marxist criticism was turned on other theories of, and prescriptions for, development, from the explicit anti-communism of the mostly American modernization school to the paradigms of mainstream social science to such closerideological neighbours (and competitors?) as the varieties of dependency theory and social democratic (and nationalist) versions of structuralist economics - all this, of course, in addition to the usual internecine intensity of debates between Marxists. There was also a great deal of creative analytical and empirical Marxist work, however, ranging from, say, the investigation of intricate structures and processes of class formation in villages and rural localities to analysis of the functioning of international divisions of labour. Much of this work was published in the lands of journals listed above, which were read widely by those on the left with intellectual interests and political concerns that extended far beyond development studies in its restrictive sense even when they were employed within it.26
Marxist academics employed in development studies, however, were not necessarily detached from its more applied work, even as they engaged in and contributed to wider debates within Marxism and across the social sciences. First, there was considerably more space for the expression of Marxist ideas in development studies in its founding moment, with its relatively more expansive horizons and recognition of the intellectual importance and power of Marxism, not least in large regions of the South, by (some) non-Marxists. Second, Marxists and many on the non-Marxist left, including more progressive social democrats, often shared political sympathies on particular issues, for example concerning the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions, and a predisposition towards helping more progressive regimes and governments in the South to formulate and implement their development strategies. This is a lineage that can be traced from the 1950s in Nehru's India17 through Nkru-mah's Ghana and Sekou Toure's Guinea, and revolutionary Cuba, to Allende's Chile in the early 1970s and on to liberated Mozambique and Nicaragua of the Sandinistas.28 Third, in the conjuncture described there were, as indicated, many apparently progressive regimes in the South to work with and an ideologically more conducive set of governments and aid agencies to support such work, especially in (social democratic) northern Europe (and Canada) and in some parts of the UN system.
The question remains: what, if anything, was specifically Marxist about the methods and techniques, as distinct from the commitments and motivations, applied by Marxist 'practitioners' in their employment by, or cooperation with, the efforts of progressive regimes in the South to promote economic and social
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development? Or, to put it somewhat differently: what distinguished the practical policy designs of Marxists from the prescriptive framework and planning methodology of structuralist economics more broadly (with which Marxism shares a common lineage of classical political economy)? My hunch is that the answer is probably Very little'. On one hand, Marxists, like structuralist economists more generally, developed and debated the case for development strategies based in public investment, planning and coordination, and did so through arguments about methods of resource allocation and their efficiency/ effectiveness which drew on elements of other paradigms in economics.39 On the other hand, as W. Brus (1991: 339), one of the principal eastern European theorists of 'market socialism', observed in relation to possible affinities between planning in socialist regimes and under social democratic governments in the capitalist North: 'any analogy must be very tentative both because of the starting position and because of the profoundly different conditions of struggle for achieving the desired aim'.
It may well be that the questions just posed are not the right ones, and that Brus's reference to different starting points and conditions of struggle points towards more apposite questions for assessing the distinctive intellectual contributions, actual and potential, of Marxism to understanding - and facilitating - processes of development, to which I return below.
And the Marxists? It. Political defeats and beyond
If the founding moment of modern development studies seems part of an already distant past, the contrast between the conditions of Marxist intellectual work then (the 1960s and 1970s) and now (since the 1980s) appears as an almost epochal rupture. And, of course, it is a rupture marked not only by the demise (albeit by very different routes) of the 'actually existing socialisms' of the Soviet bloc and China but also by the retreat and disarray of social democratic politics, as well as the disappearance or mostly accelerated decline of historic communist parties in the European democracies. In short, the current moment is one of massive defeat of the left, both Marxist and non-Marxist, throughout the North, if not so comprehensively across the South.30 This necessarily has a profound effect for the conditions, preoccupations and styles of Marxist intellectual work in universities in both North and South, and the ways in which it links with the wider political environment and its contradictions - or fails to do so.
Many formerly Marxist academics, whose formation was in the 1960s and 1970s, have abandoned Marxism; there is much less Marxism available to today's university students as part of their general education in the social
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sciences. The connections between Marxist intellectual work and the programmes and practices of progressive political formations, both parties and regimes, have eroded with the demise or decline of the latter (and however vicarious such connections, or claims for them, sometimes were). To the extent that one or another variant of Marxism exemplified a (fashionably) radical stance in the social sciences only a few decades back, this has been largely displaced by the various currents of post-structuralism, postmodernism and the like (loosely defined), the 'radical' ambitions of which rest on their subversions of the claims of existing forms of knowledge to objectivity and of any political aspirations to a project of universal emancipation. In relation to development studies, the effect of the postmodern(ist) 'turn' is to deny the validity of any conception of development other than as for an iraperializing (Northern) discourse imposed on the South. In short, in the conditions of political defeat outlined, the space for Marxist intellectual work - as for most intellectually expansive, and scholarly, endeavour? - within development studies has been reduced drastically by the ascendancy of a neo-liberal common sense of the epoch on one hand, and, on cite other hand, by the self-regarding ambition of postmodernism to monopolize the modes of critique.31
More broadly, Marxist intellectual work today has lost two of its virtually definitive points of reference, and contestation, of most of the twentieth century, namely the existence and influence of regimes claiming the credentials of 'actually existing socialism' and a Leninist model of the party as the indispensable organizational vanguard, leader and shaper, of socialist politics. Those who retain a commitment to Marxist ideas confront a massive challenge with the loss of these intellectual-cum-political preoccupations, so long at the centre of intra-Marxist debate. Key questions of that challenge include: What explains the (global) victory of capitalism? What are the prospects and opportunities of (what kinds of) capitalist development in different regions, and for different classes, in the South? And what remains politically with the demise of any evident socialist (development) alternative?
Most fundamentally, in the light of historical experience to date it may prove impossible to rethink notions of any feasible socialism(s), and of socialist development, that can be projected into a foreseeable future. The best that can be said, with no guarantee of success, is that paradoxically - or dialecticalfy - that process of rethinking socialism should, and can, be informed by analyses of a now untrammelled, and ever more globalizing, capitalism, the contradictions that drive it and the social and political struggles it generates. Three aspects of this can be indicated which link with some of the themes already indicated in this essay.
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The first is the critique of neo-liberalism in all its aspects from theoretical doctrine to the practices of development (and Northern foreign policy) interventions. There is no lack of such critique today and, as might be expected, it embraces a wide range of ideological currents - including various strands and combinations of nationalist, populist and deconstructionist elements - on various sites of contestation, and with different degrees of intellectual coherence and depth. In an important sense, then, the vitality of critique is assured, but this is no ground for intellectual complacency that assumes, in Manichaean fashion, its virtue and innocence by contrast with neo-liberal vice and guilt. Not only is such critique so diverse and so often confused, but the strength of its fervour can manifest an underlying sense of impotence in the face of an apparently rampant global capitalism. For Marxist intellectuals the utility of critique has to be informed and assessed by its contributions to developing a better understanding of changes in the world(s) they inhabit.
This leads to the second aspect: analytical and empirical work on the ways in which capitalism is changing today and its effects for economic growth and poverty/inequality in the South. In my view, this is the area in which university-based Marxist intellectuals, in the conditions of wider political constraint sketched, can make their most significant contributions. The work of critique, in Marx's sense, is addressed both to existing social relations and realities and to the ideas/ideologies that, in claiming to explain them, justify them. And such critique, as Marx was also clear about, can only be carried forward by generating analytically superior results. This, then, is a research agenda for Marxists concerned with development: to investigate, understand and grasp what is 'changing before our very eyes' in the world of contemporary capitalism (Bernstein 2004), and thereby to subject Marxist analysis to the necessary test of whether it can generate new knowledges and by what distinctive means available to historical materialism, both inherited and that can be created within its intellectual framework. This is the test of the reproduction of Marxist ideas in any dynamic, rather than antiquarian, sense.
Whether these new knowledges also disclose possibilities - 'irnaginaries', in the jargon of the day - of different social relations and realities, and how plausibly and effectively they do so, in turn links to a third aspect: that of identifying and understanding, and supporting as appropriate, those forces that contest the capitalist social order in ways that, with all their inevitable contradictions, point to alternative, more progressive futures. Here the major challenges to the dynamic reproduction, hence relevance, of Marxist ideas - and the challenges that generate the most intense disagreements between Marxists of different stripes - centre on the analysis and assessment of the poli-
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deal character and potential of such social forces in the South in a historical moment when belief in the paramount role of the Leninist party and its sociological foundation, the 'organized working class', is no longer viable. This, then, is one extension, among others, of Brus's reference to different starting points and different conditions of struggle (cited above). Other examples of its applications include serious engagement with the ideas and practices, in all their diversity, of 'anti-globalization movements' (not the same as either sweeping endorsement or dismissal of their analyses and claims); the scope of popular nationalist politics in opposition to both imperialism and domestic reaction - e.g. the powerful essays on South Asia by Aijaz Ahmad (2000); and debate about redistributive land reform driven by politics 'from below', rather than by programmes of (bourgeois) 'modernization' and the World Bank (e.g. Bernstein 2004; Moyo and Yeros, 2005).
I am aware of the prescriptive tenor of how I have sketched these three aspects of Marxist intellectual work on development, and by extension on contemporary imperialism, in current conditions, and - by the same token? - how this has moved away from some of the specific issues concerning development studies proposed earlier. What, then, of issues of practicality? Of development studies as applied knowledge, and its 'room for manoeuvre' when the spaces once provided by more progressive regimes in the South (and governments in the North), and by intellectually and ideologically more sympathetic elements in aid agencies, are so reduced? One response presents a different land of paradox: the extent to which critical intellectual work of any substance on development - Marxist and other - requires a greater distance from the agendas of official development discourse and practice and their 'knowledge-power regimes'. The paradox is that this is to reinstate a classically 'liberal' theme of intellectual work, namely the necessity of its independence from established centres of power, privilege and patronage. That independence in development studies in British universities is now subject to the combined pressure of neo-liberal development doctrine and a higher education policy for competitive performance in the market for research funding with its conceptions of ostensibly beneficial knowledge 'output'.
This is not to be judgemental about those, Marxists and others, who undertake applied research and consultancy on behalf of government and other aid agencies, and may do so in the quest for 'room for manoeuvre' and/or for other purposes. It is simply to recommend that they do so without illusion; a self-conscious cynicism may be less harmful existentially than delusion of self and others. There is a final point to be made about 'practicality' - or, in more grandiose terms, about Utopia and reality. The most identifiable criterion of
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many academics in development studies is the demand for their services as experts by aid agencies. This is far less elusive than any measure or assessment of the effects of such activity in accelerating economic growth and/or reducing poverty, as part of the mission of those agencies. The formulation of that mission - as 'pro-poor' (capitalist) development, or (in the terms I have suggested) as a global project of extending bourgeois civilization to those denied its benefits - is, I suggest, no less Utopian, no more 'practical' or 'realistic', than the fantasies of socialism once entertained by many Marxists.33
Conclusion
This essay has emerged in more idiosyncratic fashion than envisioned, which perhaps reflects personal experience, with all its attendant tensions (and worse?), of many years of employment as an academic social scientist concerned with issues of development and intellectually committed to Marxism. That element of biography, even without the confessional mode of several contributions to the first part of this book, no doubt manifests itself in ways I failed to anticipate. Nevertheless, it seems right to conclude with some brief observations on the intellectual power and promise of a Marxist approach to processes of development, as distinct from the issues that confront Marxists who may be employed in development studies in its restrictive or institutional sense.
The most salient feature that is most directly relevant is the breadth and depth of Marxist analysis of the political economy of capitalism, which is unparalleled in the other great traditions of social science enquiry. This is a form of analysis centred on social relations, their historical formation, contradictions and changing forms, above all but not exclusively relations of class. Indeed, as hinted earlier, analytical class 'purism' remains a major obstacle to the renewal and development of Marxist investigation, and the knowledge it can yield of how (global) capitalism works, with all its Northern and Southern variants and with all its manifold contradictions: across social relations of gender, ethnicity and generation, of mental and manual labour, countryside and town, and other divisions inscribed in its social divisions of labour - as well as, and intimately connected with, those of class. What makes capitalism dynamic, and the effects of its uneven development for different regions and social groups within its international structure, remain central preoccupations, the exploration of which today requires the labour of innovative empirical research and analysis as much as (more titan?) that of theoretical elaboration.33 At the same time, this requires engagement with other approaches capable of generating
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and reformulated by a Marxist intellectual agenda to its benefit.
The vital question of a viable Marxist political project - the future of socialism - in current and foreseeable conditions remains as problematic as ever, and even more unanswerable. An element of solace in this is that the contributions of academics to the malting of revolutionary or transformational politics are, in any case, negligible, and recognition of this may help to avoid the seductions of amour-propre that professional intellectuals are prone to. Awareness of the limits of one's conditions of social existence can enhance a fitting modesty, and also the nature and quality of intellectual production possible within those limits - better that than the hubris of the philosopher-Id ngs of the neo-liberal ascendancy in development studies.
Notes
1 I am grateful, as always, to my co-worker T. L Byres for discussion of some of the issues touched on in this essay; responsibility for how those issues are presented remains mine alone. As should be evident, this essay is of a preliminary, hence provisional nature. It was written before I was aware of the stimulating recent work of Michael Burawoy on the sociology of (American) sociology, to which Ben Crow alerted me. The essay would have been enriched had I been able to adapt Burawoy's delineation and uses of professional, critical, policy and public sociologies as intellectual/social practices (e.g. Burawoy 2004) to considering the intellectual and institutional trajectories of development studies. Also missing is any consideration of the magisterial title essay in Leys (1996), which concerns some of the same issues that I comment on here, albeit on a broader intellectual canvas. Finally, I have adapted the title of another essay I admire gready, that by Mark Harrison (1979), which likewise has resonance for what I attempt here, albeit addressing very different historical circumstances.
2 In France, as one might expect, development research organizations were established by the state, funded from its aid budget and staffed by experts employed as civil servants. The nearest equivalent in Britain was the founding of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. This was announced in the White Paper of the Labour government elected in 1964 which established the Ministry of Overseas Development, the first time that Britain's foreign aid programme became the responsibility of a full department of state. The first director of IDS was Dudley Seers, a central figure in its founding.
3 In the South, development studies - where it exists - is one expression, among others, of the commitment to national development that typified the moment of political independence and remains a fixture, if somewhat embattled, of the discourses of official politics. Its establishment and profile as a distinct academic entity in die South may have been patchy for a different reason to its relative absence in the USA, namely that national development, and how best to achieve it, was the principal preoccupation across social science departments and institutes in Asian and African universities, as to a large extent in Latin America. To be an economist, say, in India or Tanzania or Chile was, in effect, to be a development economist.
4 The more recent demise of the USSR, as well as the course of decollectivization
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and liberalization in China and Vietnam and the dire condition of the Cuban economy, means that today there is no extant version of a state socialist model of development, for better or worse, some effects of which are touched on below.
5 It should be evident that these grand themes also bear on what we now commonly term modernity, with the diverse and fierce debates in the social sciences and cultural studies today which attach to it. It is rare to find all four sets of themes listed synthesized in a single text with much analytical rigour and historical depth. The book by Schwartz (2000) is an unusually impressive attempt to do this; the scale of its ambition and the concentration of its arguments make it a demanding read but by the same token a rewarding one.
6 Two very different books that have done much to stimulate interest in the lineages of ideas about development, and which iUuminate their contemporary relevance, are by Kitching (1982) and Cowen and Shenton (1996}. The latter is a Marxist account while the former is strongly influenced by its author's long-standing engagement with Marxist ideas. Gavin Kitching (now in Australia) and the late Michael Cowen were notable intellectual figures in development studies in Britain during important parts of their careers, and at one time were colleagues at the Centre for Development Studies, Swansea, while Robert Shenton is an American-born historian of Africa based in Canada. Starting from the eighteenth-century Physiocrats, Kitching provides a lucid and accessible account of populist ideas, their sources, and how and why they are reproduced in the long history of capitalist development in different places at different times, together with a critique of populism based in an 'old orthodoxy' of political economy: the necessity to development of processes of accumulation and industrialization which are inevitably disruptive and painful. Cowen and Shenton's book is highly ambitious and original, and brilliant in parts; it is also, in contrast to Kitching, very long, very eccentric and very reader-unfriendly in its organization and style. (To my knowledge, it is the first work on the history of development ideas to devote a long chapter to the theology of Cardinal Newman - and probably the last.) Their account is grounded in the problem of order disclosed by the disruptions and upheavals of early industrial capitalism and the 'dangerous classes' it generated, especially in relation to labour markets, employment and unemployment; how that problem was constituted as an object of social theory and solutions to it theorized and applied in 'doctrines of development' that prescribe harmonious development under state trusteeship, hence 'intentional' versus 'immanent' development in their terms; and the intrinsic contradictions of such doctrines in both theory and practice, from their early manifestations in Britain and its colonies (including mid-nineteenth-century Australia and Canada) to today's universe of development discourses and interventions.
7 This is explicit in the use of the tide International Development by some university departments and centres.
8 The importance of the brief 'developmental' phase towards the end of British and French colonial rule in Africa in the late 1940s and 1950s, and of its legacies, is well established by recent work in modern African history; Cooper (2002, especially ch. 5) argues that the continuities of a state-led development project were more significant in certain respects than the moment of political change from colonial rule to independence in sub-Saharan Africa. Iam sceptical that the redeployment of former colonial ad ministrators in the new development agencies of the North contributed much to the intellectual framework of development studies. In my own experience the characteristic, and defensive, stance of most such veterans, former district officers and die like, was an ideology of 'practicality' and anti-intellectualism. Interestingly,
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Robert Chambers (a contributor to this volume), who appears the most obvious exception to this observation, is best known for his reflections on styles of development practice. With a few noteworthy exceptions, a more explicit theoretical focus on development administration came later with the neo-liberaf interest in state reform and efficiency (see below), drawing on developments in neo-classical economics.
9 Its outstanding representative in the formation of development studies in Britain, both intellectually and institutionally, was Dudley Seers (see also note 2 above)
10 A different kind of argument for the 'end of development' as a national, state-led, project - and by extension the end of development studies as originally conceived and practised - is generated by theories of the encompassing power of globalization (e.g. McMichael 1996), usually but not necessarily on the left.
11 For example, two of the largest postgraduate programmes in development studies in Britain today were, in fact, established only in the early 1990s in the University of London, at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) and the LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science). While development studies in the institutional sense appears to flourish still, it can be argued that die centrality to it of a distinct field of development economics, defined by the kinds of concerns noted and with its strong structuralist emphasis, has been undermined: there is now only one (neoclassical) economics, that most dismal of 'sciences'.
12 What needed replacement included the contributions of the Bank and other donors to the debris of that period, produced inter alia by the incoherence of aid policies and practices and the frustrations and tensions generated by their results.
13 Which the mostly American social and political theorists of modernization in the 1950s and 1960s were clear about.
14 Wuyts (199a) advocates an analytically more expansive conception of public goods, as shaped by the social and political dynamics of'public action', in opposition to the restrictive technical definition of public goods in neo-classical economics - a definition which is currently shrinking its sphere of legitimate application in the interests of privatization and market provision.
15 Indeed, it can be argued that notions of development strategy of any substantive content are largely absent from the intellectual framework of neo-Hberal 'policy science'.
16 And those who fail to play by the rules are criminalized by the discourse, in effect; rent-seekers, for example, are associated widi corruption, while social actors and practices that disturb the social and political order of an emergent global bourgeois civilization exemplify criminal violence. A recent addition to the concerns of development studies - stimulated, funded and steered by aid donors - is the area of state collapse, crisis states, and so on. The connections between development doctrine and global order/security are explored in a stimulating book by Duffield (2001). There are resonances here of the centrality of order to much of the work on political modernization in the 1960s and 1970s, with the particular stimulus at that time of the Vietnam war. Huntington (1968) was a key figure then, as he continues to be with his thesis of the 'clash of civilizations' (2002, first published in 1996). In a recent book review (of Moore 2003), Robert Wade (2004:150) reports that 'The murderous attacks of September 11 were, of course, very helpful in forging the consensus at Doha [in the WTO, World Trade Organization, meeting], two months later. Moore [then Director-General of the WTO], with US Trade Representative Zoellick and EU Trade Commissioner Lamy, toured deveioping-country capitals to insist that the new free-trade round would be a blow against AI-Qaeda - and that objectors would be considered as renegades in die war against terror.'
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17 This is not to say, of course, that there is not widespread recognition and analysis ot processes of struggle and conflict over 'development' in the current period of neo-liberalism, registered politically in anti-globalization sentiments and movements, for example, and intellectually in the wide and diverse array of criticism of structural adjustment models and policies, of the World Bank and the IMF, and so on (see below). My suggestion, however, is that such oppositional thinking thrives outside the institutional spheres and practices of development studies rather than contributing to its internal debates, with their increasingly constrained political and intellectual limits.
18 In the case of Britain, this would also entail investigating how changes in the political and institutional framework of universities, including the pressures of government education policy and its funding mechanisms - and how universities handle these changes - affect the character of development studies departments.
19 Alongwith tendencies to celebrate the 'local' and 'indigenous': the Ge/neiir-schaftlichkeit ('comnmnity-ness') of the 'natives' once more?
20 If to an insignificant degree compared to commercial consultancy firms, from the big corporates - where the serious .money is - to ihe small independents.
21 Together with the intensity of continuing national liberation struggles in Africa as well as Asia, and of rural guerrilla movements in Latin America.
22 Including the role of communist parties in relation to working-class militancy in the North during the 1960s, with France in 1968 as the near-definitive case.
23 (n addition to the impact of Maoism noted, tendencies to 'Third Worldism' were also stimulated by the writings of Frantz Fanon among others. In the output of a burgeoning Fanon industry (stoked by 'post-colonial' cultural studies), the biography by David Macey (2000) is a deeply sensitive and illuminating account of the experiences that stimulated the formation of Fanon's ideas, and hence is the best antidote to the crudity of so many partisan formulations of 'Fanonism' by both its champions and detractors.
24 The concerns of classic Marxism were focused on the problematic of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, in both its western European heartlands and
the adjacent zones of incomplete transition/'backwardness' (what would later be called 'underdevelopment') in southern and eastern Europe, and Ireland. Also highly influential, however, were the importance of analyses of imperialism by Lenin and others to subsequent work on development/underdevelopment in the peripheries of imperialism. For example, Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital (1963,6rst published 1913) was an important influence on the formulation, in the 1960s and 1970s, of the articulation of modes of production to explain specific forms of underdevelopment, and their reproduction, in tbe conditions of capitalist imperialism. As with so much else at the time, the foremost theorists of the articulation of modes of production were French Marxists, in particular two formidable scholars of Africa: Claude Meillassoux and Pierre-Philippe Rey.
25 A companion volume by the same three authors was titled simply For Mao: Essays in Historical Materialism (1979), a reference to Louis Althusser's seminal for Marx (1970, first published in France 1965).
26 Also at this time there were fewer dedicated development studies journals and other publication media.
27 With its intellectually formidable planning apparatus which attracted such European Marxist luminaries as Charles Bettelheim and Maurice Dobb (on whom see further, note 29). .
28 In several of these cases there was an influx of expertise from tbe Soviet bloc as well as a range of Marxists from other countries, some of them Communist Parry members but many without party affiliations. The encounters of experts of such different provenance - with each other, and with the political and administrative structures and cadres of the countries they worked in - would make for a fascinating ethnography of one type of situation of development practice. A more recent example - and perhaps the last for the foreseeable future - of international mobilization of expertise on the left was Making Democracy Work: A Framework for Macroeconomic Policy for South Africa, produced by a learn of progressive South African and foreign economists, some of them Marxists, during the transition from apartheid in the early 1990s (MERC 1993) - and which sank with barely a trace under South African governments from 1994.
29 Writing of Maurice Dobb - 'undoubtedly one of the outstanding political economists' of the twentieth century - Amartya Sen (1.990: 141,146) notes Dobb's contribution as 'a major bridge-builder between Marxist and non-Marxist economic traditions'.
30 Although the purchase of 'political religion' - in the Arab and wider Muslim world, in India ('Hindu fascism') and in Latin America (evangelical Protestantism) -challenges, to varying degrees, the popular bases of socialist, as of secular nationalist, politics.
31 Cooper and Packard (1997:3) suggest that 'The ultramodernist [by which they mean neo-liberalj and the postmodernist critiques have a lot in common, especially their abstractions from the institutions and structures in which economic action takes place and which shape a power-knowledge regime. The ultramodernists see power only as a removable distortion to an otherwise self-regulating market. The postmodernists locate the power-knowledge regime in a vaguely defined "West" or in the alleged claims of European social science to have found universal categories for understanding and manipulating social life everywhere.'
32 Donald Sassoon (1997; 767) concludes his remarkable survey with the observa tion that 'In Western Europe, the main achievement of socialism [that is, the politics of the left] in the last hundred years has been the civilizing of capitalism', rather than its replacement. I remain sceptical that there is anything of a civilizing impulse, or any significant 'room for manouevre' to stimulate one, in today's neo-liberal development institutions, discourses and practices applied to the different starting points and conditions of struggle of the South.
33 This is my opinion, or prejudice, perhaps reflecting on what now seems like the inordinate theoreticism of so much Marxist academic debate of the 1960s and 1970s (in which it was followed by subsequent deconstructiontsms: blame the French in both cases?'.)- Solid empirical research always has a utility, unlike theoretical elaboration for its own sake which remains detached from concrete enquiry.
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Althusser, L. (1970) For Marx, New York: Vintage Books
Bernstein, H. (2004) '"Changing before our very eyes": agrarian questions and tbe politics of land in capitalism today'Journal of Agrarian Change, 4(3-4): 190-225 (special issue on Redistributive Land Reform Today, ed. T. J. Byres)
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Cooper, F. and R. Packard (eds) (1997) 'Introduction', in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on theHistory and Politics of Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press
Corrigan, P., H. Ramsay and D. Sayer(1978) Socialist Construction andMarxist Theory: Bolshevism and Its Critique, London: Macmillan
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7 j Journeying in radical development studies: a reflection on thirty years of researching pro-poor development
JOHN CAMERON
This piece describes my research journey from 1973 to 2003. It is intended to inform the reader about the shifts that have taken place in development studies over those thirty years as seen through my eyes. In that time, I have been privileged to have worked for significant periods in South Asia, the smaller South Pacific island countries and Ethiopia, and for briefer stretches of time in East and West Asia and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. I have always been to the left in politics and get terribly angry about poverty, so I make no claims to have achieved, or even attempted to achieve, objective universality in this reflection. The epistemological virtues, if any, of this piece lie in being ontologically explicit, respectful of logic and sceptical of empirical claims to incontrovertible evidence.
The underlying theme is how poverty has been understood as a vital distinguishing feature of development studies as an area of research. It attempts an archaeology of the concept of poverty through digging down through the strata of my writing, though the presentation starts at the lowest strata. The archaeology reveals both change and continuity, though the emphasis here is on a cumulative continuity. There is much in the debates between liberals and radicals over basic needs in the 1970s that is recognizable today, both by aid technologists attempting to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Maoist guerrillas in the hills of Nepal. But there have been changes. The rise of neo-liberalism has touched everyone's lives and poverty, like everything else, will never be quite the same again. But to reflect further here would be to end a voyage before it has started. So, let us journey back in time when development studies and I were much younger.
This chapter traces a personal journey that has a public face. It aims to show the changes in both analysis and observation that I have undergone over thirty years of researching poverty and how these are reflected in my publications. But the journey proves to be more about add-ons than reversals, a process enriching the understanding of poverty.
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Understanding change in the human condition in the early 1970s when I started field research in development studies can now be seen retrospectively as standing at a crossroads in a journey from post-Second World War optimism to millennial pessimism in terms of prospects for eradicating poverty. On the positive side, rational small farmers had been discovered in the 1960s and the informal sector was being explored in the mid-1970s, both of which discoveries gave greater respect to poorer people. In the mid-1970s, 'basic needs' was to acquire strategic status as a development concept. Unfortunately, the 1970s also saw the massive rise in international debt that would change the whole development debate in the 1980s.
Developmentally, the global economic 'long boom' between 1945 and 1970 ended with an economic whimper as the USA de-linked its currency from gold and a political bang as it faced military defeat in Vietnam. In poverty terms, statistics reported at the end of the First United Nations Development Decade in the 1960s suggested that the number of people in absolute poverty had actually risen in the previous ten years (Pearson 1969).
The independence 'honeymoon' of the first generation of post-war, former colonial states, notably in South Asia, was coming to a close as hard foreign exchange became scarcer. For mainstream development economists, a new era was opening with Social Cost-Benefit Analysis (SCBA) offering microeconomics methods for technically rationing resources (Little and Mirlees 1969). SCBA was capable of including poverty indirectly through giving labour a low shadow wage rate with implications for the location of more labour-intensive economic activities in areas of labour abundance and choice of labour-intensive techniques for all activities. More boldly, SCBA in radical hands could directly give added weight to costs and benefits attributed to the poor. But an element of judgement was required, and this was generally rejected by positivist economists.
Any inclusion of poverty in economics analysis was welcome as mainstream neo-classical economics was notoriously poverty-blind (Cameron 1992). But for wider development studies, the question was not so much how poverty could be included in analysis, but why so many people were poor. Importantly, the answers to this question were seen to lie in political economy and not in economics.
Political economy questioned the mainstream development research claim to be the apolitical technical handmaiden of post-colonial developmental states. A generation of radical researchers with no direct experience of colonial regimes was emerging in the West. They were strongly influenced by
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Latin American experience of more than a century of'flag' independence with continuing mass poverty. The 1959 Cuban revolution was seen as a potent claim against this history (Huberman and Sweezy 1961). Also, the more positive accounts of China's Cultural Revolution were giving a new lease of life to intellectual Marxism-Leninism for radicals in a generation that had been distanced from the Soviet Union by Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in
1968 (Robinson 1970).
It was in this intellectual atmosphere, though also equipped with the dry, rigorous tools of neo-classical economic analysis, and full of determination and with some trepidation, that I set off for Nepal with partner and child on New Year's Day 1974. The challenges and opportunities of being a member of a small, multi-disciplinary team on a well-funded, two-year research project lay ahead.
The mid-1970s: Marxian modes ofproduction analysis
The aim of this section is to demonstrate the contribution that Marxian thought has made to development studies. Marxian methodology insists we look at how people are brought together in processes of production as an ontoiogical foundation. Epistemologically, Marxian theorizing is dialectical in seeking out tensions and rejecting models of equilibrium. Marx claimed to have logically deduced that widespread poverty, seen in terms of insufficient consumption to reproduce a healthy human life, is intrinsic to the reproduction of the capitalist system as a mode of production. As the system is now global, that widespread poverty is now distributed globally. Interest in Marxian analysis in development studies peaked in the 1970s, but the principles described in this section still have relevance today, although the structuralism and associated lack of human agency have been tempered.
Neo-Marxian thought on political economy had a growing influence on development economics from 1955 to the late 1970s. Key texts included Paul Baran's political economy of growth (Baran 1968) and Gunder Frank's development of underdevelopment (Frank 1969). Other related thinkers could be found in South Asia and western Europe, including those of French Althus-serianism, the UK New Left and the Frankfurt School and the Monthly Review school in the US'A(Aiavi 1972; Blackburn 1972,1977; Braverman 1974; Godelier 1972; Marcuse 1964; Sweezy and Bettelheim 1971).
Marx bequeathed a rich set of texts on how to understand one particular mode of production - the capitalist mode of production. At the core was alogical model building up from the concept of the commodity relationship, through labour power as a commodity in relation to capital, economic exploitation and
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the relationship between capitals to a tendency towards systemic crisis in which class struggle could play a crucial political role. Supporting the logical model was a dense historical description of how capitalism came into ascendancy in the UK and how the interests of capital were moulding cultural and political institutions that would support the extended reproduction of capitalist relationships despite the tendency to crises (Marx 1954,1964; Hilton 1976).
Marx also suggested a historical progression in which modes of production succeeded each other as their developmental potential was exhausted (Marx 1970). Transitions between modes of production were not rigorously described, but the idea gave a much-needed dynamic to the application of the modes of production model to Nepal, where capitalist development was very patchy and rural society tended to be seen in terms of a customary equilibrium as documented by cultural anthropology. In Nepal, with its limited experience of colonialism and numerous examples of non-capitalist economic practices, it was easy to think that a process of transition to capitalism was still taking place.
Confidence in neo-Marxian modes of production and transitions analysis underpinned two papers published in 1979 (Cameron 1979a, 1979b). These papers are the mere single-authored tip of an iceberg of continuing substantial co-authored writings that have resulted from twenty-five years of team research on Nepalese underdevelopment. Two of the original co-authored texts have been republished in South Asia after a gap of twenty years, suggesting some continuing relevance of the original neo-Marxian theoretical approach {Blaikie et al. 2002).
The 1979 papers use a modes of production/transition to capitalism analytical framework and organize both qualitative and quantitative empirical data to place two groups of unambiguously poor people - agricultural labourers and highway construction labourers - in the context of a late transition to capitalism. The style of analysis owes much to the writings of E. P. Thompson on an earlier transition to capitalism (Thompson 1968).
The papers attempt to describe people's economic experiences as complex combinations of feudal extraction, primitive capitalist accumulation and capitalist exploitation with the Nepalese state treated as playing a significant role in causing underdevelopment The epistemological appeals are to rigorous logic and careful observation, plus recording 'voices' of the otherwise unheard experiences of these people. There is an element of forecasting in the papers, though this is very much in a radical pessimism vein of the long-term historical inevitability of oppressive and exploitative continuity, rather than potential immediate action, by the people themselves, to produce change.
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Generally, modes of production and transitions analysis as an approach to poverty fell from grace in western European development studies in the late 1970s (later in South Asia). The foundations of the analysis were torn apart by a tendency to go into totally obscure abstraction or into naive empiricist description (Foster-Carter 1978). The 1979 papers can therefore claim to meet the specific and peculiar epistemological standards of modes of production analysis as a particular way of looking at processes of change. But more importantly they attempt to capture the lived political economy of being exploited and oppressed agricultural or highway construction labourers in Nepal in the mid-1970s, thus providing a historical account of lived experiences of poverty for which there is a very limited written record.
It is difficult for me to stand back from these papers in terms of their representation of lived lives, even after twenty-five years. The intellectual position is one of commitment, with a clear indignation that these people and their offspring would continue in poverty as a consequence of processes of underdevelopment in peripheral capitalism. In terms of predictive accuracy, the radical pessimism proved unfortunately accurate over the following twenty years (Cameron et al. 1998). The rise of a Maoist movement across Nepal in the following five years utilizes the same Marxian understanding of poverty that I used in the 1970s, though with much greater confidence in the agency of the poor.
The early ig8os: engagingwith a potentially developmentalist state
The convention in development studies up until 1980 was to invest the state with a virtual monopoly of developmental agency. While the rest of society could be structurally analysed, the over-arching aim of research was to inform the present government or some more developmental future government on what it should do, notably to reduce poverty. This section describes such an engagement with a state that seemed to have genuine developmental potential, highlights the approach to development studies research implicit in such activity and explores the conditions needed for it to be effective and ethical. Development studies researchers still frequently engage with informing and advising governments, and why such engagement should be critical and have an exit option is examined in the following section.
Mainstream development studies has had a strong, if naive, tendency to treat the state as an effective anti-poverty agency. Cameron (1985b), writing on poverty in Fiji, can be seen as following that convention - although arguably more politically radical and historically sensitive. The article also follows the spirit of the Brandt Report in claiming to set a social democratic developmental, anti-poverty agenda (Brandt 1980).
In terms of a potentially benign, developmental role, the state in Fiji appeared more promising than most in the early 1980s. The country had received 'flag' independence in 1970 and the colonial inheritance had left a balanced external trading position with a reasonably sound government revenue base. The self-acknowledged primary task of the post-independence government was to reduce the greater inequities of colonial spending priorities, in 1982, when I arrived in Fiji to work as an EEC-funded consultant in the Central Planning Office, the economy had middle-income status globally and was still fiscally sound. Also, a mixture of prudence and good fortune (given the behaviour of world sugar market prices in the 1970s and access to the EEC market) meant that the economy was not heavily internationally indebted and had been little affected by the global hike in real interest rates in 1980.
Politically, Fiji had conducted general elections regularly since independence and there were active mass media, a trade union movement and customary institutions as indicators of a healthy civil society. Thus, the developmental challenges for the Fiji state were being widely discussed internally. A central debate involved the future of the schooling sector, where the tensions were apparent between advocates for education for labour market flexibility, planned 'manpower' requirements and effective citizenship (Cameron 1985a). A comparative approach was used to clarify the issues involved and show that the debate could not be resolved through 'technical' expertise but that wide public debate was necessary to seek a consensus (Cameron 2000b).
Poverty was a developmental issue in Fiji, though less widely debated as absolute poverty was virtually absent. A paper written in 1985 (Cameron 1985b) is my contribution to the poverty debate in Fiji for an academic audience. The paper shows the existence of poverty in Fiji at that time, even on the basis of a relatively 'generous' poverty line, and its policy manageability. Both quantitative survey evidence and more qualitative insights from policy records were used to demonstrate that the colonial inheritance in terms of welfare policy was proving less andless adequate in meeting equity-justifiable claims forpublic assistance. Technical economics and discursive techniques were also combined in an effort to bring authority and understanding to policy processes.
Understanding the role of ethnicity is vital to any research in Fiji. The 1970 constitution had embedded ethnic difference deeply in the political system by making it a formal factor in the electoral system. Cameron (1987a), in an explicit attempt to contribute to greater ethnic understanding, applied the type of production analysis that underpinned the Nepalese writing (though less explicitly than in the papers on Nepalese agricultural and highway building labourers). The paper shows how a distinctive Fiji-Indian/In do-Fijian society,
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worthy of respect as an indigenous creation, had lifted itself out of poverty in the 1920s and 1930s. The socio-economic form of production and pattern of life that were a consequence of their specific experiences in Fiji further legitimized their claim to national identity.
In an attempt to contribute to conceptualizations of development and poverty as a whole-life experience, I combined demographic and economic status data with Active Life Profiles to indicate societies' developmental status across time and space (Cameron 1987b). These profiles were intended to be an alternative, or at least a supplement, to GNP per capita as a developmental indicator. They also lent themselves to ethnic and gender comparisons, both of which were important to Fiji's development debates, and allowed comparisons to be made internationally and within Fiji. As with more direct poverty analysis, the results suggested that the ethnic groups had different experiences, but were not simply rankable in terms of inequality. They also suggested that lived lives in Fiji for ethnic groups and genders were different from lives in Hong Kong and Malaysia, with their own merits and weaknesses. As with the other papers in this period, the argument was not seeking a technical closure of debate, but a contribution to better-informed debate in a lively, open polity.
Together these four papers represent efforts to bridge academic epistemo-logical standards and policy processes in discussing poverty. But this was at a time when the intellectual iceberg of global neo-liberalism was drifting closer to the islands and threatening to freeze all meaningful debate on poverty and inequality. They can be academically criticized as being too engaged with, and one-sided on, the ongoing policy debates in Fiji, but both the data and their analysis have proven sufficiently resilient to be acceptable as a basis of a more recent publication (Cameron 2000c).
Later 1980s: malign external hands and neo-liberalresource allocation priorities
In many circumstances, development studies, with its focus on poverty, must recognize that it faces a situation where effective agency lies beyond the national, let alone the local, level, and damage to people's lives is being done at such a distance that accountability has lost any meaning. The global order has never been a Westphalian system of sovereign states meeting on level ground. In the last fifty years, state sovereignty has become even more a relative, rather than absolute, quality. The papers in this section place the cause of poverty, and a national inability to do anything about it, in the global domain. The analysis is not about lack of 'aid' - in one case there was arguably too much 'aid' - but instead focuses on political judgements in the interests of
an outside agency. In such circumstances, understanding the situation of the poor and vulnerable of one country requires engagement with decisions over which they would have no control, even under a democratic national system of politics. The relevance of this form of analysis to the current global situation should not need further explanation.
The process of debating poverty and inequality in Fiji was fundamentally changed by two military coups in 1987. Elsewhere in the Pacific region at almost the same moment, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) were coming to 'flag1 independence after a forty-year period of UN trusteeship under the USA. In the following few years in South Asia, Pakistan returned to full electoral politics at the same time as it ceased to be a cold war front-line state with the withdrawal of the USSR's troops from Afghanistan.
In all three cases, developmental research on poverty was being strongly influenced by external agencies. The context for conducting research was not being left to national governments, whether formally more democratic or more authoritarian. The willingness of the Bretton Woods institutions (hereafter IFIs) to intervene in national macro-development strategy and micro-policy decisions grew in the 1980s and has been widely documented (Banuri 1991; Mosley et al. 1991; Petras 1997). The IFIs were directing economies down a one-way street of liberalization and deprioritizing poverty analysis, and international indebtedness was a vital element in their capacity to influence policy in most cases.
Neither FSM nor Fiji was particularly indebted. Even Pakistan, which was heavily foreign-debt-exposed in the early 1980s and had signed a sequence of structural adjustment agreements with the IFIs, came under real pressure to fully implement these only after the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989. In all three cases, the process of liberalization was not simply an economic process but had implications for wider debates on multidimensional deprivation and vulnerability.
Cameron (1993a) analyses the background to the Fiji coups of 1987 using conventional tools of political economy in terms of class analysis. The elite post-colonial political inheritors were becoming increasingly exposed to criticism as being uncaring and corrupt. Therefore, the emergence of a new opposition party, the Fiji Labour Party, building on the trade union movement, had a historical logic, and its alternative economic strategy, entitled 'clean and caring', included a greater concern with deprivation and inequality. The 1987 general election, however, which the Labour Party-led opposition won, was too close in terms of votes, and perhaps too early in terms of the political development of the party, to give a clear mandate for an alternative economic
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development strategy. The IFIs had been pushing the Fiji government towards liberalization with some success in the mid-1980s, but their leverage had proved relatively weak. More ominously for the new government, however, the year 1987 was a peak year for the Reagan regime in the USA in terms of both liberalizing economics and cold war politics.
The new Fiji government was committed both to more economic intervention and a non-nuclear South Pacific. In the Pentagon model of the world at that time, there were only 'ours' and 'theirs' and the newly elected Fiji government was not unproblematicaUy 'ours'. The leader of the first military coup was rapidly recognized by the USA as Fiji's legitimate political leader with no disturbance to bilateral economic and political relations. I argue (Cameron 1993a) that these anti-democratic forces had to usurp state power as they were losing the rational debate with their deceptions/corruption unmasked and the only remaining option was conspiratorial coercion and violence. In summary, the exploration of an alternative pro-poor development path in Fiji was overridden by a combination of internal and external anti-democratic forces, and a development studies researcher concerned with poverty had no place in the new order.
In an article in 1991 I describe the creation of FSM as a complex process from late colonization to decolonization in which conspiracy is seen as playing only a minor role - more an unintended, developmental disaster. The sideswipes of other people's agendas, notably post-Second World War confusion over cultural 'modernization' and the 'Great Society' experiment in the USA in the 1960s, washed over the islands, drowning autonomous economic, cultural and political developmental potential, although welfarism meant that absolute poverty was absent. United Nations indignation finally brought FSM into existence in 1987 as a by-product of a more general agenda of late decolonization. The underdevelopment of FSM was unmasked at the moment of independence, and the only clear option to escape long-term, structural poverty lay in mass migration to the USA. Understanding the relationship between continuing poverty and migration became a feature of development studies in the 1990s. Indeed, in FSM it was the risk of descent into poverty as a consequence of loss of superpower patronage which shaped the relationship.
Cameron (1997a) engages with another national development disaster in the shape of Pakistan, where absolute poverty is rife. The paper suggests that in every developmental dimension Pakistan is either a well-documented failure or the statistics suggesting non-failure are dubious.
While Pakistan was a front-line cold war state with Soviet troops in Afghanistan, the West was willing to accept the corruption and violence that were
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blighting so many people's lives in Pakistan. This relationship has now been given new life under the slogan of the 'war against terrorism'. Structural adjustment agreements were signed with the IFIs, but poor implementation was forgiven and 'Official Development Assistance' ensured there was sufficient foreign exchange to maintain Pakistan's military spending. With the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan and then imploding, the IFIs were given more room to insist that structural adjustment conditionalities were implemented.
The paper argues that a consequent concentration on privatization has diverted developmental priorities and energy away from anti-poverty policies. The high profile given to privatization is due to its relative convenience for both the IFIs and the national government as an institutional gambit that can be isolated from more difficult, delicate matters. It has also proved conveniently corrupt! ble for powerful private interests in Pakistan, giving much opportunity for Byzantine relationships with transnational corporations (TNCs) in which the interests of the mass of the population in Pakistan, especially the vast majority of women, are at best sidelined, at worst damaged.
The early lggos: thinking development anew, ancient and postmodern
This section reflects on the ideology that has underpinned the view that poverty should not be a subject for serious research since the advent of social Darwinism in the mid-nineteenth century. The argument varies from the claim that the poor are economically (and socially and politically) inadequate to the position that poverty is a normative concept inaccessible to pbsitivist science. Development studies has given little credibility to such views, but it ignores these arguments at its intellectual peril, especially when they are advanced by people in power. Despite the claim that the Washington consensus of the IFIs has ended and hence neo-Iiberalism is no longer hegemonic in these institutions, there is a continuing need to confront those who dismiss poverty as a valid field of research.
Neo-liberalism is an ideological force upon which every development studies researcher has had to reflect since the 1980s. Much effort has gone into denying neo-liberalism's claim to have arrived at 'the end of history' (Fukuyama 1992) and, with that, the end of poverty by allowing market forces to determine the distribution of everything. Every less developed economy has experienced increasing inequality despite the end-of-transition promise of neo-liberalism, and its attendant neo-classical economics, to abolish poverty. This promise is not based on careful empirical studies, but emerges logically from ontological claims drawn from philosophy and economics. Only once these claims are critiqued and exposed can a space be created for alternatives to be proposed.
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The following discission focuses orTarocJes mat attempt to meet neo-iiDerai-ism on its own ideological territory.
Cameron (1992) starts from the basic premises of neo-classical economics and connects them to the wider philosophical propositions of liberal individualism in order to demonstrate the ideological foundations of neo-liberalism and the subsequent formulation of structural adjustment policy packages. The paper argues that this philosophically holistic neo-liberal model is a formidable, but nevertheless relativistic, intellectual position. It can claim to be rational (in the sense of logically rigorous), realistic (in terms of empirical non-falsification and some appeal to describe positive and negative experiences), and regulatory (clear policy recommendations) but it cannot claim to be universal in any of these dimensions.
Therefore, a major challenge for those who feel uncomfortable with the neo-liberal position is to construct an alternative intellectual reality that is equally comprehensive in its rationality, realism and regulatory dimensions. This argument suggests that the Adjustment with a Human Face (AHF) position associated with UNICEF (Cornia et al. 1987), though laudable in intention, falls short of meeting this challenge. AHF concentrates on the realism dimension by marshalling empirical evidence that children have failed to thrive under structural adjustment regimes. This was an embarrassment for the neo-liberal position, but not deeply intellectually damaging. The AHF case is therefore vulnerable to being reduced to a temporary qualification to the neo-liberal position. Arguably AHF in practice took the form of add-on compensatory social dimensions to structural adjustment packages.
Cameron (1992) suggests that a full alternative to neo-liberalism needs to start from a clear alternative ontological position. It proposes a modification to the Kantian categorical imperative of a universal right to non-deception and non-coercion as such a rigorous alternative. From this perspective, the greatest obstacles to reducing poverty arise from deception and coercion in any of their many guises. For instance, corruption and threats to security not only ruin lives in themselves, but also undermine confidence and close routes to escape poverty. Poverty decreases in a society when the degree of deception and coercion experienced by people decreases. Neo-liberal claims that the more a society is based on market principles the less poverty there will be can then be assessed in terms of whether people feel confident in their day-to-day lives as well as their levels of consumption. These ideas are worked upon further in a later paper (Cameron 1999b).
The intended effect of these papers is to undermine neo-liberal claims to be the universal development theory and neo-classical economics a value-neutral,
- scientinc approach to resource allocation and to restore a concern with poverty as a central intellectual issue.
The mid-1990s; closely observing poverty
This section is concerned with the empirics of poverty. Poverty is multidimensional and impossible to capture with a single indicator. In addition, many of the indicators advanced for estimating poverty are either difficult to observe or liable to substantial inaccuracies in observation. The papers in this section offer positive ways forward to observe poverty without falling into the quantitative versus qualitative debates or 'magic bullet' choices that have bedevilled choices of methodologies.
Poverty is a complex concept that opens up a wide potential for observation. The intention to know poverty from direct observation drove my research in Nepal in the mid-1970s. The opportunity to collect and, where necessary, re-gather large amounts of primary data over an eighteen-month period resulted in an appreciation of the information cycle from variable conceptualization and sampling design through collection, processing, analysis and reporting. The potential for errors and inaccuracies at each stage in the cycle, and how earlier errors can feed through to later stages, was learned the hard way at first hand. Conventional statistical concerns with significance in relation to sampling error were discovered to be only one form of error, and often relatively unimportant. Therefore the data, interpretations and conclusions were self-critically and reflectively sieved for possible errors and inaccuracies and subjected to tests of robustness.
The immediate responses to AHF after 1987 were social policy add-ons to structural adjustment programmes, provided they could be justified in terms of poverty and/or gender impact. But such evidence was hard to find given the erosion of standardized national survey and livelihoods data collection in the 1980s and demands for data on fiscal matters and financial flows rather than for poverty measurements. Alongside increasing quantitative survey data, however, there was a revival of interest in ethnographic methods (encouraged by increasing academic interest in gender analysis and postmodernism). This revival of theoretical interest in qualitative data was of special interest toNGOs. They were particularly interested in using Participatory Rural Appraisal as an approach to understanding the lives of poorer people in a more empathetic, locally sensitive manner.
Cameron (1993b) was a general reflection on these issues and Cameron (1996) represents an attempt to resolve some of these issues in practice in Bangladesh, building upon similar, but more extended, research in Pakistan
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(Cameron and Irfan 1991). The study of Bangladesh combines quantitative, large-scale, standard Labour Force Survey data with more qualitative data. The tabulated survey data are adapted to provide more sensitive insights into time use and gender issues and make them more compatible with local, qualitative data.
The difficulties of combining limited quantitative and qualitative data under great time pressure to monitor and understand processes of change and observe and evaluate the impact of development agency interventions are a continuing challenge in poverty analysis. Keeping a healthy tension between rigorous thinking and careful observing is a fundamental epistemological challenge in pro-poor research.
The late 1990s: back to basics
In this section I trace responses to the re-emergence of concern with chronic human vulnerabilty in the 1990s. The emergence of HIV/Aids as a developmental challenge was paralleled by increasing existentialist concern with mortality as a developmental as well as a philosophical issue (Lyotard 1991). One direction of response is into relativism; another leads to social theorizing on unifying basics of human material existence - time, energy and space, and reproduction, morbidity and mortality.
Therefore some of the papers written between 1994 and 2000 (Cameron 1994, 1997b, 1998 and 2000c) can be seen as fundamentally concerned with people's bodies in terms of accessing sources of energy and ways of understanding use of time and energy in economic activity. This concern can be understood in the post-cold war historical conjuncture of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with its image of an 'impasse' in development studies (Booth 1985) and the rise of anti-development thinking (Escobar 1995). The 'back to basics' element found in these publications was also present in much of my consultancy work at this time, including famine prevention in Ethiopia and human reproduction interventions in Ghana and Pakistan. In similar vein, I was responsible for closing an ILO project in Burma/Myanmar in response to evidence of widespread physiological abuse by agents of the government. Thus, development studies and development policies appeared to be increasingly concerned with dealing with people whose very existence was under threat.
In 1998 I re-engaged with the fundamentals of absolute poverty in terms of chronic food insecurity and returned to Nepal. I worked as an FAO-fimded poverty and food insecurity consultant contributing to the Asian Development Bank-funded Agricultural Perspective Plan (APP), looking forward fifteen years to 2010. The underlying approach was to combine water and transport infra-
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structure development with neo-Iiberal confidence in open market forces and small farmer short-term profit-seeking. Poorer households and women were to benefit from the trickle-down of supply side and demand side linkages, as described by Mellor (1976). Unfortunately for the APP and most people in Nepal, the evidence of the twenty years since my first fieldwork in rural Nepal in the 1970s did not suggest significant changes in rural lives, especially in poorer households and for women (Cameron et al. 1998). Consequently I described an alternative model of change, and continuity, in rural Nepal and made the case for direct action to reduce poverty and food insecurity and conserve the physical environment (Cameron 1998).
In Cameron (2000c) I returned to my work on poverty in Fiji in the 1980s, whose continuing relevance was reflected by being cited in a report on poverty in the late 1990s (UNDP and Government of Fiji 1997), and adopted neo-Kantian thinking on violence and deception as a conceptual basis for understanding poverty. The management of cross-ethnic relationships is put forward as a basic development challenge in Fiji, requiring resources to be prioritized for social policy if social tension, with its negative effects on the psychological quality of life and threat to the physiological quality of life, is to be reduced.
This focus on improved health and concern with management of the state of the human body has postmodernist resonance (e.g. in the works of Foucault). The critical pressure from environmentalists on the great developmental meta-narrative of modernism and its theme of inevitable progress has forced theorization of development studies back towards the physical and human physiology with its vulnerability to damage and death. Ensuring environmental conditions for better human health is a valid poverty focus and arguably should be at the centre of development flunking and practice. But such prioritization runs the risk of reducing the development discourse to technocratic management of the physical environment and human bodies. Basing development thinking on the care and maintenance of the human body has to take into account that poor people possess self-awareness and a capacity for choice as agents, albeit in the face of much uncertainty.
The present looking to the future
The journey described so far can be summarized as follows:
• a starting point in neo-Marxist modes of production analysis with an explicit concern with the concept of a structurally exploited, poorer class in an uncertain transition to capitalism with a developmentally ineffective regime;
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• working in the context of a complex economy with the concept of poverty to inform a developmental^ more effective regime with a potential for further reform;
• critiquing external interventions when they are either masquerading as technical economic advice or claiming to defend individual liberty as an ultimate universal developmental 'good' and decentring poverty as a conceptual and policy concern;
• challenging the neo-classical economics foundations of neo-liberalism/ structural adjustment to reveal its non-universalist nature and the possibility of a rational alternative with poverty as a central concern;
• meeting the methodological/empirical challenges of data shortages and fragmentation with respect to poverty;
• drawing a universalist physiological bottom line to poverty under the wider development discourse as a partial response to postmodern relativism.
Although each step in this journey has its own distinctive identity, there is also a cumulative fundamental continuity in the relationship between development studies and poverty research. This is based on the continuity of positive and normative ontological stances, teleology, observation and ethics.
Positive or normative ontological positions are distinguished by the degree of the researcher's detachment or commitment to a specific ideological position. Research on poverty is shaped by wider development policy processes, commitments and conditions set by funding and implementing agencies. For example, a researcher needs resources for fieldwork and, in development research, these resources rarely come without implicit or explicit judgements on what constitutes poverty in the human condition. It is possible to maintain a consistent ontological stance, however. My own resarch has been committed to the improvement in the quality of life of specific groups of people and is consistently sceptical of the proposition that open market forces are the sole means to diminish poverty.
There is a continuing concern not to specify development processes in terms of a closed future that is analytically inevitable or evaluatively desirable. Although the papers presented here are not particularly teleological in vision, they do tend to be pessimistic and most do allow room for human agency. For example, the continuing influence of Marxism in my work has been more concerned with the crisis-ridden uncertainty of capitalism than the inevitability of socialism.
In terms of observations of poverty, the quantitative data in my research acknowledge that likely total errors of plus or minus 20 per cent would leave
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the conclusions largely intact. The continuing sympathy to denser, local, more ethnographic methodologies originated in my early Nepalese fieldwork, which involved careful local observation and listening to people in villages. Efforts to combine quantitative and qualitative methodologies are evident in much of the research as is a scepticism of the accuracy of large-scale surveys and the representativeness of larger populations in small scale studies.
Another continuing concern has been with research ethics. In Nepal in the 1970s, respondents had to be protected from the state. I argue that poverty research must always be concerned with the vulnerabilities of the people who are being researched. Later this was extended to the right not to be deceived as part of the Kantian categorical imperative applied to research data collection and use.
As to the future of poverty research in development studies, Amartya Sen raises issues of valuation of well-being in a wide-ranging development ethics framework. He also resists epistemological closure of debates arguing that the responsibility of research is to inform debate, not offer solutions (Cameron 2000b). The New Institutional Economics combines analysis of collective agency, acting under conditions of uncertainty, with useful models of the costs that give historical continuity, including that of the reproduction of poverty (Cameron 1999a; Cameron and Ndhlovu 1999; Cameron 2000a). Livelihoods analysis at its best attempts to grasp the totality of lived lives, including a civil society and social wealth dimension (Cameron 1999a), though this last point is not without its critics (Fine 1999).
The unifying principles acknowledge the importance of seeing human beings in poverty as constrained agents collectively making history, not necessarily under conditions of their own choosing. The future for an even more intellectually inclusive discourse on poverty in development studies may be found in further adding on to previous thinking and observing of poverty. The journey continues.
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j The rise and rise of gender and development
RUTH PEARSON
Few would doubt the success of 'gender and development' both as an intellectual project and as a lens for viewing development analysis and practice. Gender talk is everywhere - mainstreaming gender into all development policy and practice, targeting women's practical and strategic needs, developing gender-participatory budgets, celebrating the high participation of women in micro-credit initiatives, lamenting women's susceptibility to the HIV/Aids pandemic, celebrating women's key role in population policies and family planning, foregrounding women's rights in the new development turn to a rights-based development approach. The success of gender and development is also reflected within the academic and other institutions that provide student courses and qualifications both at masters level and in terms of professional training. In addition gender and development research activities have mushroomed in recent years with increasing numbers of academics (the vast majority women researchers) being employed in the research institutes and development studies centres in the UK, western Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America, and to some extent in North America also. In the UK the Institute for Development Studies' (IDS) pioneering MÄ in gender and development established in 1986 was followed by the postgraduate gender programme at the University of East Anglia in 1991. Since that date a number of other development studies institutions at, for example, the London School of Economics (LSE), Manchester, Leeds, Wolverhampton, Warwick, Swansea, Reading and Wolverhampton have run postgraduate courses and/or shorter professional training courses in the area of gender and development (see Development Association Guide, <www.dsa.org.uk>).
Given this exponential growth in the area we can argue that, in many ways, gender and development has 'arrived'. In its beginnings some thirty or more years ago, gender issues were seen as a feminist diversion from the real issues of poverty and modernization which preoccupied development planning and thinking. As in the social analysis and policy of Northern countries, there was an ongoing struggle to include women's experiences, interests and marginali-zation as central issues for analysis rather than specialist minority interests for feminists and fanatics. And while the parallel examination of men's gender identities and interests is still in its infancy (see White 1993) the inclusion of
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