ENV three eleven Lecture one: Framing Environmental Issues in the Developing World
ENV three eleven Lecture one: Framing Environmental Issues in the Developing World
Development
● Aim towards reduction of poverty
· Progression/advancement towards goal (modernization)
● Binary Hierarchy: developed versus developing world
· Modernization theory: assumes that all societies move through the same stages of development, that development is linear and progressive.
Assumes poor/developing countries are on their path to reach end point (Global North as end point)
· Assumption one: Development is natural and inevitable
· Assumption two: Underdevelopment exists independently
Leaves out history, and that much of the world that is 'underdeveloped' were more technologically significant earlier in history, and wealth in some places may have been dependent on the exploitation and impoverishment of others
· Reading asks: What does development actually do? "What does it produce in practice?
· Pushes against the common-sense view of development (technical)
Common-sense view: development is a well-intentioned effort to reduce poverty
· Prevents seeing what development actually does
· Asks what kind of reality does development actually produce and authorised
· There is a fundamental misunderstanding of this idea: Lesotho was misunderstood and misrepresented by the development industry/actors
Used to justify rural development interventions
Development agencies misunderstood the country and actively constructed a specific version of Lesotho that made certain economic relations invisible, in order to allow the work of development agencies in this area
Most men working were already a part of the economy, poverty wasn't caused by isolation/lack of development, but exploitation
· Development works by transforming political problems into technical/procedural ones
Framing poverty as "a lack of skills"
Framing leaves out political/economic context for example Regional power relationships
Solution also becomes 'technical', intervention (development experiences) come in to fix problem
· Ferguson calls it an 'Anti-Politics Machine' because it obscure attention to economic and political and structural factors
· Development projects failed
More important question: What do aid programmes do besides fail to help poor people?
What do these projects actually accomplish? Establish bureaucratic state control
Fail economy but succeed in setting up bureaucratic state control in really tightly managed ways greater than not necessarily good control
Fails in what it sets out to do and succeeds in other ways
What Ferguson Teaches Us:
What Ferguson Teaches Us:
Development is a power-laden process with depoliticizing effects
· With legitimacy through 'expert', technical knowledge, despite significant gaps in understanding of the local contexts in which they operate