so on – also requires a discipline which currently
does not exist, namely the cultural study, or per-
haps the ethnography, of development economics
(Thrift, 2000). Rosen’s (1985) book on the gener-
ation of US economists, including George
Ackerloff and Stephen Hymer, who played a key
role in India is one model of what is required to
grasp the rise of a global neoliberalism; Hall’s
(1989) book on the circulation of Keyenesian ideas
between the wars is another. I would add only that
the so-called Washington consensus that marked
the hegemony of neoliberalism in development
thinking in the 1980s and 1990s is itself unstable.
The sort of struggle documented by Wade
(1996) between Japanese policy makers and
the US Treasury and the World Bank over the
so-called ‘East Asian miracle’ is a vivid case in
point; the political struggles within the World
Bank associated with the departures of two
senior bank officials, Joseph Stiglitz and Ravi
Kanbur, is another (Wade, 2001). None of this
should alter the fact that between 1965 and 1975
there was a curious sort of intifadahin conven-
tional development discourse. One can argue
about its longevity and how much was pure cant.
But it marked a watershed in which the techno-
cratic and growth-driven paradigm of the 1950s
was put on the back burner. It is hard to imagine,
for example, that 30 years later the UNDP could
publish its Human Development Report – a
document devoted to new measures of develop-
ment and to the promotion of capabilities (Sen,
2000) over income or consumption – had there
not been this 1960s abertura.
One of Arndt’s insights, subsequently elabo-
rated (see the contributions in Cooper and
Packard, 1997; Crush, 1995), was that develop-
ment, understood as a shifting set of knowledges
and practices focused on the developing other,
spoke as much to the realities of the advanced
capitalist states and their internal problems as to
the realities of the poorest 40 per cent. The link
between the events of 1968 and the shift from
development as growth to development as basic
need provision can and should be read in pre-
cisely this way. None other than Richard Jolly,
one of its key architects, explicitly attributed this
shift to the ‘growing questioning of Western
consumer-urban-industrial models’ (cited in
Arndt, 1987: 108). Questioning the Holy Grail of
GNP was derivative of the social crisis of the
North Atlantic economies. Indian economist
Deepak Lal (cited in Arndt, 1987: 67) is not far
from the mark when he notes that the concern
with the social, with equity and with redistribu-
tion reflected the failures of the American dream
and of the inability to solve the race and inequal-
ity problem in the US in particular. It is noaccident that Robert McNamara’s first speech
which identified the poorest 40 per cent began
with a discussion of poverty in the US (Watts,
2000)! The meanings of development and its
political semiotics are seen to be profoundly
dialectical; ideas and people travel between
north and south and among and between sites of
practice and knowledge production. The detec-
tion of some originary point in the genesis of
development ideas proves to be particularly
tricky.GovernmentalityA second line of work engages with institutional
politics, self-reflexivity and the poststructural
insight that development is a set of discursive
practices and representations. Development
practices can be construed as forms of what
Michel Foucault called governmentality, the
‘disabling of old forms of life by systematically
breaking down their conditions and constructing
in their place new conditions so as to enable ...
new forms of life to come into being’ (Scott,
1995: 193). To understand development is to
grasp how ‘the possible field of action of others’
(Foucault, 1982: 221) is structured, how the triad
of sovereignty, discipline and government
through a variety of technics and micro-politics
of power (from the map, to the national statistics,
to forms of surveillance) accomplish stable rule
through governable subjects (Li, 1999).
Development came to be seen as an ‘everyday
form of state formation’ (Joseph and Nugent,
1994). Some of the earliest work by Escobar
(1992; 1995) and Mitchell (1995) saw the busi-
ness and apparatuses of development as a
power–knowledge nexus, but it was weak empiri-
callyand shallow in its grasp of the development
institutions themselves.
A raft of new scholarship – prompted by
Ferguson’s (1990) excellent ethnographic account
of a development project in Botswana – has
begun to explore development in a much more
grounded institutional and textual way, posing
hard questions about how development ideas are
institutionalized and how particular development
interventions may generate conflict as much as
consent; and it has begun to examine the internal
dynamics and complexities of large, internally
differentiated multilateral development organi-
zations. This tack takes the social constructionof
knowledge (by whom, which what materials,
with what authority, with what effects) and
the relations between knowledge and institu-
tional practice very seriously, and in so doing
can identify struggles and spaces in whichALTERNATIVE MODERN 4373029-ch23.qxd 03-10-02 4:55 PM Page 437