Why it’s important to contest ‘development’ - and how to do so

BY CLAIRE MCLOUGHLIN

Sometimes we assume that people everywhere want the same thing. We project our versions of a ‘good’ life onto the lives of others who surely, like us, aspire to a certain status, wealth, wellbeing, or set of worldly possessions. These egocentric tendencies underlie how the discourse and practice of ‘development’ became synonymous with the ‘one-size-fits-all’ pursuit of modernisation – a Western-centric recipe for ‘progress’, the key ingredients being industrialisation, capital investment, technological advancement, and institutional development.

The temptation to homogenise human wants and needs isn’t just a naïve mental tic, but a harmful fallacy. It leads us too quickly to assume that development is everywhere desired, and desirable, when in reality there are always winners and losers. And when the Western project of ‘development’ promotes universal endpoints, it denies the myriad ways in which colonial injustices ensured that there could never be a level playing field for countries to reach those endpoints, even if they wanted to.

But what is development for, then, if it isn’t ours - or even someone else’s – pursuit of the good life? The answer, of course, is that there can never be one answer. This isn’t a typical academic cop out, though. In a way, the answer lies precisely within this unsatisfactory, non-answer. In practice, development is really about contesting different answers to this very question. People answer differently because of the diversity of wants, needs, and preferences of different individuals, groups and nations with divergent identities, lived experiences, and views on how things are and should be. Development can only happen by confronting and resolving these differences. It is the unavoidable process of contesting alternative desired futures.

This is the core claim we advance in our new book, The Politics of Development, where we unpack the what, where, why, and how of contestation. Drawing on a range of lived experiences across the world, we shine a light on how this process enables or constrains progress in tackling some of the world’s most intractable challenges - from poverty, inequality and exclusion, to the climate crisis and rising conflict.

But what does the process of contesting alternative desired futures look like, in practice? And why is it a better starting point for studying and researching development than ‘everyone wants the same thing’?

The short answer is that it allows us to do justice to the diversity of desired futures while studying them through a comparative lens – one that can reveal not flatten lived realities and the legacies of inequality and injustice that colonialism left upon them. It does not reduce the study of development to a narrow focus on end-goals, but forces us to interpret them as products of the process of their creation, and therefore dependent upon the power dynamics therein. Neither does it confine us geographically to outdated binaries between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world. Contestation is possible everywhere and anywhere there is a felt mismatch between desired futures and lived realities.

Most importantly, perhaps, it sharpens our analytical focus on the process of contestation as the object of analysis. We need new tools to analyse who can contest and how they do that, which brings us to how power operates inside these processes. In our book, we deploy the three ‘I’s framework of institutions, interests and ideas to uncover this.

We argue that anywhere alternative desired futures are being contested, there are:

· Institutions: formal and informal rules for resource allocation;

· Interests: being contested by more (or less) rational actors with competing interests;

· Ideas: these actors hold a range of ideas about what is right and fair.

The three ‘I’s may seem deceptively simple, but they offer a window to complexity. They are how people contest alternative versions of desired futures. They are why they challenge or accept the status quo, or use their agency to mobilise for or against it. And ultimately, the outcomes of those contestations determine whose version of a desired future becomes lived reality, regardless of our own, prior conceptions of what that should look like.

The Politics of Development is a new textbook and an introduction to this important field. Starting from the perspective of people’s everyday experiences, it tackles some of the most pressing questions that underlie global inequality and injustice, from the ground up.