The Reinvention of Development

Abstract

The chapter starts with a recapitulation of the main arguments: first, that the facts of development are usually highly aggregative, have a strong tendency to encourage thinking that development is one dimensional, and coexist with a parallel set of facts of development, equally easy to access, that argues that thinking in this way obscures reality and risks denying voice to poor people or others. Second, that the social epistemologies that give meaning to these facts are: sectarian, in the sense that we find a range of differing belief sets, each of which asserts that it is true, in a world of multiple truths; they are located within historical habits of believing in metaphorical accounts of social change that are essentialist; such metaphorical accounts contrast with those in a natural science method; official aid practice, as shown by bilateral donors and the DAC umbrella, requires interventions to assume, in the name of formal accountability, that cause–effect relations are predictively known, and this is expressed in the techniques of the log-frame. The knowledge deployed in this official aid practice is, however, metaphorical rather than predictive.

The chapter then looks at the conflict between classic and radical social epistemologies. Under such conditions, considerable tensions arguably exist between what important social epistemologies say is the case and what is experienced. The conflict is political, in the sense that mainstream social epistemology, believing in predictively known cause–effect relationships embodied in log-frames, is endorsed by various agencies—donors—whose principals are the elected governments to which they themselves are accountable. Then, it recapitulates the reinvention of development—the conservative and radical responses. The conservative approach, expressed through theories of change, allows asserted predictive knowledge of cause–effect relationships to continue to play a central role in the organisation of development. It allows for horizontal inconsistency, in that different aid projects and other interventions can now more easily have mutually inconsistent cause–effect relationships built into them. But it requires that each intervention has just one such notion. The radical approach addresses directly the possibility that cause–effect relations in social change are not (perhaps for the moment) predictively known. It allows for people to choose to believe this. The chapter discusses how the focus of the book has been upon a case study—contemporary mainstream ways of organising international development interventions—and also on how the industry of official aid works and the social epistemologies embedded in it. These epistemologies, however, are not only concerned with aid work, for they are close to powerful epistemologies relevant to how developed country states engage with social change in their own countries. Since these countries are democracies, this is related to how democratic government happens and how it is understood. In its final conclusions, the chapter makes two points: (1) if predictive power is absent, as is likely, standard methods of accountability are deeply flawed and lack the proper formal foundations they pretend to, (2) if accountability is based upon trust, the old mainstream ways of policy making will flounder, for no narrative will dictate what led to what in terms of inputs and outputs. These two implications are all signs of deep flaws in dominant social epistemologies that must be corrected if we want to move forward. The point is to be effective rather than right. If there is diversity and stubbornly messy complexity, and being right means having predictive capacity, then trying to be right too easily leads to the void. And if you want to win, you may need to be efficient.