The Facts Behind Development’s Facts: The Epistemological Assumptions of Mainstream Development

Abstract

This chapter focuses upon the question of knowledge—epistemology—to prepare the reader for the arguments in Part II. It draws upon Chaps. 1 and 2 to have a preliminary look at particular beliefs about change and progress that are a part of international development. It starts to treat mainstream development ideas as usefully understood as metaphors, thus linking what are called theories of development to the idea of metaphor. It links this to old idea about knowledge production entailing repeated shifts between induction and deduction, with the former understood in the book as theorisation. It links these to standard international development intervention tools—the log-frame—and argues that nothing is intrinsically wrong with accounts of the world and of social change that are metaphorical and that offer accounts of abstract realities that give meaning to people’s lives in some way or another. But we can readily see how we need to treat such accounts with care if they are offered as guides to action, when that action requires reliable predictability. The book’s basic theoretical position is thus highly conventional, asking what the links between theories and their facts are, and whether these links are predictive. It locates these points in a discussion of ‘heretical Christianities’—‘postdevelopment’, ‘neo-Marxian’ and OXFAM—arguing that all assert that they know what will lead to what. Social acceptability of a variety of beliefs, each of which asserts it is correct, is a familiar characteristic of many societies, including those that I refer to as Christendom (including their secular components). Such societies manage multiple truths, and belief can usefully be thought of as primarily a basis for social organisation and community. Thinking in these terms allows one to envisage different approaches to international development in similar terms and to appreciate their wider context. This starts to point the way forward. Can it be better to believe (in a particular context) in the possibility that no known order exists: that here there is a situation of a ‘knowably unknowable unknown’? In terms of the contemporary (DAC) mainstream, this is to advocate thinking the unthinkable.