Power, Resistance and Development in the Global South: Notes Towards a Critical Research Agenda

Abstract

This article engages with radical critiques of the Eurocentric grammar of development discourses. I start from a position of considerable sympathy with their appreciation of the discursive dimensions of power that attach to the idiom of development and their solidarity with the oppositional projects of subaltern groups. However, this sympathy combines with a considerable degree of disagreement in terms of how the discursive power of development is understood and how the dynamics of popular resistance are theorised. As an alternative to the relatively crude postulation of development as a discursive regime that enables the West to exercise power over the Rest, I develop an argument that emphasises the multivalent character of the idiom of development and trace this multivalence to situated contestations that take place between opposing political projects that strive to shape the form and direction of social change in specific ways. Furthermore, I will argue that this contentious dynamic becomes particularly evident in those world-historical conjunctures when subaltern groups mobilize around social movement projects that destabilise hegemonic power relations in the capitalist world-system. To illustrate this point, I will provide a broad-brushed outline of three distinct 'development regimes' that have shaped North-South relations from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century and discuss the ways in which these regimes have been destabilised by the articulation of oppositional meanings of development articulated from below by progressive social movement projects. Finally, I draw on my own fieldwork experiences to reflect on how critical scholars can engage with movement projects that challenge the dominant directions and meanings of development in ways that can contribute to democratic deliberations within social movements.

Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

“…Governance and execution concerns emerge from a number of sources including: linkages of SDGs to existing governance processes (Kim (2016) explores how the SDGs mesh with international law); the placing of agency at a state level (which is subject to ongoing contestation given globalization, see Sexsmith and McMichael, 2015); and the technologies of control and accountability (including the role of markets) that might be fit for purpose to guide and evaluate actions taken to achieve the SDGs (Biermann et al, 2017). At the core of ideological concerns is the extent to which the SDGs reinforce or challenge a neo-liberal, Eurocentric agenda (Nilsen, 2016;Weber, 2017). In this context, there are longstanding debates that challenge the possibilities for continued economic growth; contest notions of development; and which explore the impact of class, gender and race on life experiences along with consideration of the impact of past and present colonization (see Gore (2015) and Nilsen (2016) for a taste of the elements of these concerns).…”

“…At the core of ideological concerns is the extent to which the SDGs reinforce or challenge a neo-liberal, Eurocentric agenda (Nilsen, 2016;Weber, 2017). In this context, there are longstanding debates that challenge the possibilities for continued economic growth; contest notions of development; and which explore the impact of class, gender and race on life experiences along with consideration of the impact of past and present colonization (see Gore (2015) and Nilsen (2016) for a taste of the elements of these concerns).…”

Pedagogy from and for Social Movements: A Conversation Between Theory and Practice

“…Briefly, elite forms of environmentalism, proceeding from a technocratic notion of knowledge and allied to state actors, have used officially acceptable forms of action to advance particular goals which could be mainstreamed within the policy first of a national-developmentalist and subsequently of a neoliberal state. Conversely, we have a long history of popular (often but not only rural) forms of environmental justice struggles which have sought to resist developments threatening their own forms of life and to wrest control of the development process to what they often present as the real meaning of national independence, perverted by the actually existing state (for other postcolonial contexts see Nilsen 2016).…”

Give James Ferguson a Fish

“…James Ferguson has been a pioneer of critical development research since the publication of The Anti‐politics Machine (1990) three decades ago. Above all, his work has been pathbreaking because of how it has enabled scholars to discern the workings of power in a field that, in Tania Murray Li's (2007: 7) words, is far too often ‘rendered technical’ and as a result also ‘rendered nonpolitical’ (see also Nilsen, 2016). When his most recent book, Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution , which makes the case for cash transfers as a harbinger of a new politics of distribution, came along in 2015, it seemed to many that Ferguson was continuing his trailblazing — both within and beyond the academy.…”