Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
development processes refer, since features at one level are sometimes
compensated by those at another.
It is also necessary to realize that change or transition from any technology to
another will involve hardship and upset to given ways of life. Steam engines and
weaving machines displaced cottage workers in nineteenth century Britain.
Today, computers are displacing workers throughout the developed world, while
“real jobs” making things such as car components are exported to distant
countries. But social and economic change means that other employment is
always found for the displaced, and the transitions are taking place with
increasing rapidity.
In addition to the non-acceptance of development by groups in particular
regions or countries, especially those who are displaced by the changing course
of development, anti-development is a feature of academic discourse. Texts on
the subject over the past 50 years have generally accepted the idea that
development is desired by human populations and that it is indeed desirable. This
has had the effect of reducing or even eliminating any discussion of whether what
the developed countries consider to be development actually conforms to the
interests of the less developed countries. A feature of the late 1980s and 1990s,
however, has been a fundamental critique which asks whether development is an
agreed aim, or whether it might be an academic or institutional set of ideas and
practices with only limited contact with reality. The central arguments here are
borrowed from French linguistic philosophers who regard many of the academic
bodies of theory as simply that: theories which are not based on an objective
reality but on an internal logic all their own.
One line of argument of these writers, who belong generally to the post-
structuralist school, is that development is an idea created as a solution to a
proposed problem, that of poverty in the less developed countries (LDCS).
Poverty was, according to this interpretation, only “discovered” after the Second
World War, and to solve it there has come into being development, which is
essentially a technical matter (Escobar 1995, Ch. 2). Going on from this
conclusion, the West has experts and institutions ready to help solve the
problem, and the end result is intervention in the poor countries of the world.
Overall, the argument is that the need for development was invented to justify
the grand world strategies of the major powers.
Another argument in the same vein is that development is a replacement of,
and a logical continuation from, colonialism. As colonial power declined in the
1940s, development ideas were instated in its place, and power for the developed
countries to intervene was maintained. Ideas on the need for development
were discussed in the 1930s in the British Empire, and these fitted smoothly into
the post-war ideas for economic development.
In more moderate versions, the arguments are not wholly against
development, but for “another development”, picking up a variety of themes
which basically oppose the top-down organization of development efforts.
Ecodevelopment, self-reliant development, ethnodevelopment, basic needs, and a
