Contesting Classical Development Doctrines: Explaining the Movement Away from Them

Abstract

This chapter treats the position taken by classical development doctrine as contested: how has its evidently vulnerable position (as argued in the earlier chapters) not led to its replacement? In the language of the book developed earlier, if you believe that it is OK to assume that Barbie is real, strange things may happen, not least that the humanist tendencies of aid workers would confront an exclusion of human issues from discussions of development. Bias to belief implies that accepting the assumption that what adherents believe is true, or at least acting as though they do, has no significant costs. The chapter has two parts. The first looks at ‘Contemporary mainstream development doctrines’ and shows how adoption of ‘management by result’ approaches applied to development requires belief that change processes are predictively knowable, so rejection of them attacks the essential basis of their accountability. Work on development economics is discussed to push home the point that there is strong empirical foundation for the view that change is not predictively known. Discussion of various statements of mainstream doctrine—World Bank, UNCTAD—shows how, in a series of statements that stand vis-à-vis each other as coexisting truths, each was used in different ways to establish norms and goals to guide interventions. The second part of the chapter discusses classical development doctrine as deployed in the organisation of development and the barriers it erects. It looks at a case study of evaluation based upon expert views, an example of one amongst many new approaches to development—rights-based approaches—and the chapter concludes that for all the conservatism built into the mainstream ways of organising and conceptualising development, the barriers to change are fundamentally cognitive.