Liberation or Resignation: the Fall of Third World Developmentalism and the Post-Development Turn

From ecofeminism to degrowth socialists to post-development scholars, many currents of contemporary political ecology and theory start with a rejection of the obsessive focus among politicians and policymakers on economic growth as the motor of enhancing human well-being in the global north. Such approaches counter this growth fetish with an emphasis on "sufficiency," autonomy, and basic needs, focusing on the goods of these way of organizing society as forms of life in an age of well-acknowledged environmental limits. The focus on "growth" is often conflated with a politics of development. Such a conflation leaves untouched the ways that the imperial and hierarchical organization of the global political economy still shapes who can materially develop in ways that that facilitate economic diversification and who remains tied to recurring structural outcomes of the legacies of colonial monocrop raw materials and plantation production. In this paper, I first argue that these contemporary approaches partly misdescribe or bracket out their underlying historical background conditions, which is the decline of structurally transformative, redistributive interpretations of the developmental project in the global south. I show how these visions included a socialist politics in which non-capitalist development included but was not reducible to growth. In many of these more popular anticolonial formulations of the developmental imaginary, collective political self-determination and non-domination were closely tethered to self-directed socialist development as a freedom-generating practice—one meant to transform imperially engineered political-economic hierarchies of trade, economic specialization, dependency, and debt. These deeply redistributive visions ranged from the reform-minded efforts of the NIEO to the popular radical Third Worldism of Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, and Samir Amin. I then propose to read these various contemporary post-development turns as historically conditioned by the decline of these more distributive developmental possibilities. While appealing in many ways, these approaches interpreted in light of this context appear to leave activists with a politics of local, place-based refusals that does not hook up to a structurally redistributive vision of nations and global political economies. In this respect, they mirror the other small-bore alternatives that replaced development in a neoliberal age, such as micro-finance. Post-development is often better read as a politics of resignation, not one of liberation. Ultimately, I argue that the problem with the dismissal of "development" per se is the evasion (or, more charitably, the difficulty of politically mounting) of a global southern approach to planning and developmentalism that could 1) build power to counter the politics of economic and ecological imperialism and 2) mesh with and enhance more local struggles.