important changes can be and are made.
Greene’s (1999) account of how Malthusian
ideas travel over time and space, attaching them-
selves to neo liberal, feminist and environmental
agendas in specific places and times, is simply
one illustration of what in the earlier work was
passed over as the unproblematic ‘transmission’
of ideas.
Gardner and Lewis’ (2000) careful analysis
of the Blair government’s White Paper on inter-
national development can show, from the inside
so to speak, how changes of personnel and the
shifting balance of powers among interest groups
within the Department of International Develop-
ment in the UK have consequences for both the
design and the practices of actual development
work. Many of the contributions to International
Development and the Social Sciences(Cooper
and Packard, 1997) focus on the relations
between the academic disciplines and develop-
ment practice. Sharpless (1997) reveals how
demography as a practical discipline required the
conjunction of intellectual and political
processes in which the large US foundations
such as Rockefeller and Ford played a pivotal
mediating role. A similar global, institutional and
political story has been told by Perkins (1997) in
his exemplary account of the intersection of
wheat, genetics and the Cold War in the genesis
and diffusion of the green revolution technolo-
gies. Some of the work described by McEwan in
Chapter 21 in this volume on feminisms and their
relationship to development has a close affinity
to such scholarship.^3
Some of the most compelling work in this vein
examines environment and national/multilateral
development institutions. Candace Slater’s
(1994) excellent book on Amazonia, for example,
focuses on the ways in which particular regions
or ecologies are construed for developmental
purposes. She discloses a transnational popular
imagery of the region and analyses the literary,
media and other cultural machinery contributing
to what I have elsewhere called a ‘discursive
ecological formation’ (Peet and Watts, 1996; see
also Guthman, 1997). In her account, the Edenic
or naturalized narratives of the Amazon always
silence (the Indians have no voice or no voice of
their own), exclude or distort. Slater ends with
the provocation that there is an absence of
competing images of Amazonia: but under what
conditions can competing images reallycompete?
Do these images and constructions of landscape
really have the power and effect implicit in these
accounts of narratives? Are they ‘just’ images
and irrelevant to the hard edges of political eco-
nomy and environmental destruction? Mitchell’s
(1991) account of the developer’s imagery of theNile Valley – quaint, overpopulated, without
history – attempts to deconstruct conventional
development models and presumptions in a
similar way, affirming what Alfred Hirschmann
noted almost four decades ago, namely that
development ‘depend[s] upon a set of more or
less naive, unproven and simplifying assump-
tions’ (1968: 23).
Environmental and other forms of develop-
ment knowledge production can also be
approached through the ‘epistemic community’,
or communities of developmental expertise.
Here the knowledge is western science, and more
properly the cosmopolitan scientist, expert and
policy maker. Peter Haas (1990) has argued in
the context of understanding regional and global
(multilateral) conventions that the process of
consensus building and collective action more
generally is knowledge-basedand interpretive.
That is to say, international regulatory co-operation
is fueled by fundamental scientific uncertainty
about the environment which ensures that
governments seek out authoritative advisers
(experts) who, to the extent they are part of epis-
temic communities, are more important to the
political solution than the content of the ideas per
se. Cross-national differences in state behavior
are determined by the variation in the penetration
and institutionalization of experts (epistemic
communities). Biodiversity and stratospheric
ozone cooperation are seen in this way as
instances of the cognitive and bureaucratic
power of scientific experts. This is an argument
that has also been made for NAFTA by Benton
(1996) who argues that the trade and environ-
mental constituencies brought together around
tariff reduction actually created a dialogue – a
transnational community of experts – that had
not hitherto existed. Of course these epistemic
communities are porous and in local settings
knowledge carries between scientific and indige-
nous knowledge communities; at these ‘knowl-
edge interfaces’ (Long and Long, 1993) the
questions of how interpretation, authority and
practice operate – for example at the farmer
level –are rather more complicated, suggesting
complex forms of hybrid knowledge in circula-
tion (Gupta, 1998).
The epistemic community has an affinity
to political ecology’s notion of ‘conventional
models’ (Leach and Mearns, 1996) developed in
and around particular institutions and practices
that assume a hegemonic, and often uncontested,
status. Some of the most interesting geographical
research has examined the politics of colonial
and postcolonial conservation. Fiona Mackenzie
(1997) has traced discourses of soil erosion and
land conservation in the 1930s to the complex438 BEYOND THE WEST3029-ch23.qxd 03-10-02 4:55 PM Page 438