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has failed and it must be overcome. But
Escobar also draws on work produced by
dependency theoristsin the 1960s, includ-
ing Andre ́Gunder Frank. Like many others,
he maintains that the dominantmodelof eco-
nomicmodernizationin the North cannot be
exported to the globalsouth. The core coun-
tries use their power to prevent balanced
development. It would also be unwise, and
probably impossible, for the majority world
to copy the ecologically exploitative model of
development pursued in the North (see also
core__periphery model).
What made Escobar’s work so challenging,
however, was the fact that he drew on work by
Michel Foucault and thesubaltern studies
collective to think about the production of
development as a form ofgovernmentality.
Escobar argued that thethird worldhad
been invented by Americanaidprogrammes
as the residual in acold warstruggle between
the First and Second Worlds. There is nothing
natural about this social construction–
nothing, save for an uncommon history of
colonialism – that produced this diverse mix
of countries as a singular space that henceforth
would be defined by its ‘mass poverty’ and
pathological lack of development. Escobar, in
other words, argued that animagined geog-
raphyofunderdevelopmentwas constructed
by a discourse of development that infantilized
the majority world in relation to a mythical
view of a perfect and benevolent West. Under
the sign of development, Western experts (aid
workers, technicians, military personnel) were
then set free in the Third World ostensibly to
secure its own dissolution. The fact that the
United Nations designated the 1960s as the
Development Decade speaks to the hubris that
Escobar is so keen to skewer.
Escobar’s work has been important in for-
cing a re-evaluation of the (un)productive
work performed by developmentalism. By
linking the study of development togeopol-
itics, Escobar was able to raise important
questions about the meanings ofcolonialism.
Was development not simply the continuation
of colonialism by another name? Did it not
turn Third World men and women into a set
of experimental subjects, to be dissected later
in a museum or university? (See Ashis Nandy’s
comments on the back cover ofEncountering
development.) At the same time, there are
weaknesses in Escobar’s account. His sugges-
tion that development began in 1949 ignores a
history of thinking about progress and dis-
order (about development) that has been
explored in some detail by Arndt (1981) andCowen and Shenton (1996). Corbridge
(1998) and Kiely (1999) have further argued
that Escobar’s insistence on a singular dis-
course of development blinds him to the dif-
ferent governmental interventions that emerge
from, for instance, the basic needs agenda, a
gender and developmentframework orneo-
liberalism. At times, Escobar comes close to
the anti-development position of wanting to
escape from all forms of governmentality. But
it is not clear how this escape will be effected;
nor is it clear that Escobar has spelled out the
opportunity costs of his development alterna-
tives. In part, this is because he damns devel-
opment in its entirety, failing to note that life
expectancies in many parts of the world
increased at a historically unprecedented rate
after 1950.
If Escobar uses Foucault to moralize about
developmentalism, other versions of post-
development thinking are less obviously
normative. Partha Chatterjee (2004), for
example, has begun to develop a post-
colonial response to what he calls the
‘unscrupulously charitable’ gestures of neo-
liberalism, and of thenew public administration
(NPA) that so often goes with it. He has
repeatedly drawn attention to the different
chronologies of the creation of the modern
state in the West and in the countries ofasia
andafrica. In his view, technologies of gov-
ernmentalityand thecreation of named popu-
lations pre-date the formation of thenation-
stateandcivil societyin most of the world.
NPA demands for good governance and par-
ticipatory development by individuals are
often wildly at odds with local realities, where
people need the support of skilled brokers in
political society. In an exploration of develop-
ment and bureaucratization in Lesotho, James
Ferguson (1990) has charged that, while indi-
vidual development projects fail on a regular
basis, they combine to produce an anti-politics
machine that substitutes the technical jargon
of development for concerted public discus-
sion of gender relations, land rights, the nature
of thestateand so on. Ferguson’s argument,
in other words, is not that development has
failed (paceEscobar). Rather, it is that a rea-
sonably diverse range of development inter-
ventions has failed to end rural poverty in
Lesotho, but has succeeded, sometimes
unwittingly, in extending bureaucratic state
power in the countryside.
Ferguson’s work on the anti-politics
machine suggests one fruitful avenue for a
post-developmentalism that maintains links
to radical development thinking. SimilarGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_P Final Proof page 563 1.4.2009 3:20pmPOST-DEVELOPMENT