political struggles among and between the colonial
state, white settlers and the native reserves.
Neumann’s excellent book Imposing Wilderness
(1999), on the creation of the Arusha national
park in Tanzania and the ideas of landscape and
nature which lay behind state appropriations of
land from local peasant communities, is an espe-
cially compelling illustration of how cultural and
historical representations of nature intersect with
colonial and postcolonial rule.
Leach and Mearns’ (1996) reinterpretation of
the West African forest–savanna mosaic is a
careful deconstruction deploying historical studies
coupled with detailed local analysis of agro-
ecology to confirm what the new ‘non-equilibrium’
ecology posits, namely that climax models of
ecological stasis are unhelpful. These static
models however do enter into administrative
practice (colonial and postcolonial) to reinforce
the idea of Guinea’s forest cover as ‘relic’
(which Mearns and Fairchild see as the basis for
driving ‘repressive policies designed to reform
local land use practice’) rather than as the out-
come of intentional local management practice.
Swift (1997) has shown how the assumptions
about desertification in the West African Sahel
rest not only on remarkably sparse evidence but
on questionable models of the dynamics of
semi-arid rangelands calibrated through linear,
cybernetic models of ecological structure and
temporalities, and neo-Malthusian models of
social change. The source of this authoritative
knowledge is exceedingly complex and needs to
be tracked to colonial forestry and planning
agencies, to the ecological sciences and the rigid-
ity of particular models of the semi-arid tropics,
and to the thorny question of why some ideas and
some reports circulate faster and more effec-
tively than others, and why some individuals
have a legitimacy far in excess of their scientific
abilities (Baker, 2000; Davis, 2000; Taylor, 1996).
Political ecology sees the ‘new’ development-
environment practices as necessarily plural (at
the level of truth claims), democratic (to open up
the practices of policy making to other voices)
and complex and flexible (sensitive to local
conditions and historical dynamics).Post-developmentThe third thread of critical development work is
broadly Third Worldist, and much more radical
and self-consciously normative in a way that
marks it off from the new historicists. I shall
refer to it as postmodern/poststructural, though it
traces its lineage to the work in the 1960s of Ivan
Illich (1971), and earlier still to some of thepopulist and civic theory associated with
Prudhon, the Owenite socialists and others.
Associated with a number of public intellectuals
and activists largely but not wholly from the
south, it is a variegated community that has
marched under the banner of ‘post-development’.
The intellectual field which constitutes these
radical critiques of development – one thinks of
the work of Arturo Escobar, Gustavo Esteva and
Wolfgang Sachs and the new Post Development
Reader(Rahnema, 1997) as its compendium – is
replete with the language of crisis, failure, apoc-
alypse and renewal, and most especially of sub-
altern insurgencies which are purportedly the
markers of new histories, social structures and
political subjectivities (Pieterse, 1996).
The Delhi Centre for Developing Societies –
to invoke one such important and visible cluster
of erstwhile anti-development Jacobins, latterly
referred to by Fred Dallmayr (1996) as a Third
World Frankfurt School – includes among its
pantheon the likes of Ashis Nandy, Rajni Kothari
and Shiv Visvanathan who in their own way
represent a veritable heteroglossia of alternative
voices from the south encompassing a massive
swath of intellectual and political territory on
which there is often precious little agreement.
I have chosen, however, to provide a unity to these
critiques – drawn variously from post-Marxism,
ecofeminism, narrative analysis, poststructural-
ism, postcolonial theory and postmodernism – by
emphasizing their confluences around develop-
ment as a flawed, in some quarters a catastrophi-
cally failed, modernist project (see Corbridge,
1998). Much but by no means all of this critique
draws sustenance from the idea of the third leg of
modernity – the dark side of modernity and the
Enlightenment which produced the new human
sciences and the disciplines – as much as from
the Marxian leg of capitalist exploitation and the
Weberian (and Habermasian) leg of the coloniza-
tion of the lifeworld by monetization, rationaliza-
tion, calculation and bureaucratization.
This tale of disenchantment carries much of
the tenor and timbre of earlier critiques of
development – most vividly of the 1960s but also
of the 1890s and earlier, as Michael Cowen and
Robert Shenton have admirably demonstrated in
Doctrines of Development(1996) – readily
apportioning blame to the multinational behe-
moths (corporate and multilateral) of global
capitalism. Running across this body of work is the
notion of development as an essentially western
doctrine whose normalizing assumptions must
be rejected: ‘it [development] is the problem not
the solution’ (Rist, 1997). The sacred cows – for
Esteva and Prakash (1998) they are ‘the myth of
global thinking’, ‘the myth of the universality ofALTERNATIVE MODERN 4393029-ch23.qxd 03-10-02 4:55 PM Page 439