transnational activists and NGO networks have
played a central role both in attempting to hold
the Bank accountable and in preventing precisely
the type of ‘silencing’ that he refers to in his Lao
case study.
Goldman, like Moore, also raises a panoply of
questions about authoritative knowledge. He
rightly emphasizes how in project design, the
sorts of appraisals conducted are dictated by
speed – all development agencies are in the busi-
ness of moving money quickly – and how rapid
rural appraisals often generate information with-
out local input and on the basis of ignorance of
local conditions. In a curious way Goldman has
less to say on the institutional and discursive
greening of the Bank as such. Wade (1997) has
documented the stages through which the
environmental division was established, from
frontier economics before 1987, to ‘environmen-
tal protection’ in the early 1990s, to ‘comprehen-
sive environmental management’ thereafter, and
how this was driven by NGO pressure. In turn
McAfee (1999) has shown that this greening was
flawed in at least two respects: analytically, it
produced ‘ecological economics’ and what she
calls ‘green developmentalism’, which is to say a
discourse entirely compatible with neoclassical
economics; and empirically, it created a division
in which limited resources and a lack of project
accountability rendered the environmental moni-
toring of projects a relatively weak reed.
The enthnographic turn in development stud-
ies, then, has opened up new avenues for cultural
and geographical analysis. But the work of Pigg
(1992) in Nepal, and Schroeder (1999) in West
Africa, to take two examples, reveals that the
project implementation stage of development
poses knotty questions for how we think about
the transmission and reception of ideas, and how
and whether something like hegemony ade-
quately captures the relation between peasant
client and project manager. Goldman’s study
identified a community of experts whose author-
ity is totally unquestioned, whose openness to
other voices is limited, and whose ideas and
models of development are entirely self-referential,
but it is still not entirely clear why this commu-
nity does possess such immunity and authorized
power.ALTERITY[P]ostcolonial settings provide the rationale for the
idea of alternative modernities ... where incommensu-
rable conceptions and ways of life implode into one
another, scattering rather than fusing, into strangelycontradictory yet eminently ‘sensible’ hybridities’.
(Akhil Gupta, 1998)It is perhaps a sign of our times that any discus-
sion of reimaginingdevelopment or develop-
ment alternatives in the 1990s begins with the
word, with language and with discourse. And
from there it is a very short step to the ‘idea’ of
poverty, to the ‘invention’ and social construc-
tion of development. Alternatives, like every-
thing else, can be imagined at will, but
alternatives must be built with, not on, the ruins
of capitalist modernization. One of the produc-
tive ways in which alternatives have been
explored is through local ‘development’ knowl-
edge, often in realms seemingly dominated by
scientific agronomy or metallurgy or public
health (Baker, 2000; Broch-Due and Schroeder,
2000). Indigenous technical knowledge (ITK)
has been widely explored (and there are a
number of international organizations devoted to
its generation, propagation and use) and now
widely understood within academic and activist
circles (Richards, 1985). Perhaps the best political
ecological study to address the question of peasant
experimentation and practice (and the threats
which this world confronts) is Zimmerer’s book
Changing Fortunes (1996), which examines
biodiversity and peasant livelihoods in the
Peruvian Andes.
In problematizing environmental knowledges,
political ecology has identified a number of core
issues: first, it must be recognized that environ-
mental knowledge is unevenly distributed within
local societies; second, it is not necessarily right
or best just because it exists (i.e. it can be often
wrong or inappropriate); and, third, traditional or
indigenous knowledge may often be of relatively
recent invention (which is to say these knowl-
edges are not static or stable but, as Paul
Richards, 1985, suggests, may be predicated on
forms of ongoing experimentation). ITK may not
be indigenous as such but rather is hybrid
(Agrawal, 1999). Most knowledges are not
simply local but cosmopolitan, complex ‘com-
pounds’ drawing upon all manner of circulating
knowledges: farmers in India may simultane-
ously employ concepts from humoral theories
and modern green revolution technologies
(Gupta, 1998). Gupta makes the important point
that the hybrid qualities only are made visible by
an emphasis on practice rather than on a narrow
construal of knowledge. At the same time, ITK
can also take on mystical and ideological forms,
as in Vandana Shiva’s (1989) account of Indian
women as ‘natural’ peasant scientists (see
Jackson, 1997). In so far as local actors know a
great deal about local ecology and this knowingALTERNATIVE MODERN 4453029-ch23.qxd 03-10-02 4:55 PM Page 445