Development Discourse K - Michigan7 2013

***DEVELOPMENT KRITIK***
1NC Development Discourse

Development discourse extends capitalist epistemology to its furthest extent this can either
be the End of Modernity or the Beginning of Post-Modernity the spark for the alternative
Escobar 10 PhD in Philosophy, Policy, and Planning (Arturo, 7 June 2010, 'WORLD AND KNOWLEDEGES OTHERWISE,
Cultural Studies, 21: 2, 179 210, http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/text/eng/escobar.2007.CulturalStudies.21-2-3.pdf)
Why, one may ask, do these group of Latin Americans and Latin Americanists feel
that a new understanding of modernity is needed? To fully appreciate the importance of this question, it is instructive to begin by
discussing the dominant tendencies in the study of modernity from what we can call intramodern perspectives
The modernity/coloniality research program
(the term will become clear as we move along). I am very much aware that the view of modernity to be presented below is terribly partial and contestable. I am not presenting
it with the goal of theorizing modernity, but rather in order to highlight, by way of contrast, the stark difference that the MC program poses in relation to the dominant
inquiries about modernity. In the last instance, the goal of this brief excursus into modernity is political .
If, as most intra-modern discussion suggest,

globalization entails the universalization and radicalization of modernity, then what are we left with? How can
we think about social change? Does radical alterity become impossible? More generally, what is happening to
development and modernity in times of globalization? Is modernity finally becoming universalized, or is it being left behind? The
question is the more poignant because it can be argued that the present is a moment of transition: between a
world defined in terms of modernity and its corollaries, development and modernization, and the certainty
they instilled a world that has operated largely under European hegemony over the past two hundred years if
not more; and a new (global) reality which is still difficult to ascertain but which, at opposite ends, can be seen
either as a deepening of modernity the world over or, on the contrary, as a deeply negotiated reality that
encompasses many heterogeneous cultural formations and of course, the many shades in between. This sense
of a transition is well captured by the question: Is globalization the last stage of capitalist modernity, or the
beginning of something new? As we shall see, intra-modern and MC perspectives on modernity give a very different answer to this set of questions.
You Should Focus On What Gives Your Ballot Value Relying On Colonialist Assumptions For
Your Decision Calculus Is Morally Diseased And Deprives Your Ballot Of All Meaning Vote
Negative To Refuse This Model And Endorse A Critical Self-Reflective Ethic Isntead
Harzenski 2003 professor of law at Temple Law School [sharon, post-colonial studies: terrorism, a history, stage two, temple
international and comparative law journal, fall, 2003, 17 temp. Int'l & comp. L.j. 351,]
[*405] Michel Foucault tells us that even as a child he knew that knowledge could "do nothing for transforming the
world."n318 Two years before his death he expressed continuing confidence in his early perception. His personal experience had led him to conclude that knowledge could
do nothing for us and that political power might destroy us. n319 Yet Foucault was not decrying the personal search for knowledge that mapped his life. The
knowledge that could do nothing to transform the world was not so powerless when it came to transforming
the self.n320 This transformation of self through one's own knowledge is what Foucault refers to as an aesthetic, n321 and what
he identifies as a personal ethic. n322 According to Foucault, we are required to build our own ethics out of our
examination of the world of our experience subjected to our search for knowledge . n323 In his case, as in mine, what was
learned in this process of examination and reflection is that we risk dominating others or exercising a tyrannical power over them
when we carelessly, inattentively, or indulgently take care of self so that we, our personalities, become enslaved
to desire and/or fear.n324 Inverting that statement to reflect the history unveiled in this paper, when fear or desire, a compulsion to control, or greed energizes
action that action is already corrupted. In our personal lives, we must learn to manage ourselves appropriately, we must learn to behave independently in relation to external
events and responsibly in relation to our emotions. n325 An individual who justifies imposing her wishes and designs on others is overreaching. As Aime Cesaire taught us ,
society that justifies imposing itself and its values, its wishes and designs, on others, regardless of the
justification, is sick, is morally diseased. n326 What I attempted to do in this paper is document a few of the facts of a process of
imposition and overreaching that lasted for centuries and shaped the world we share presently. And, because
the process shaped the world, it shaped the world's inhabitants. In the simplest possible terms, that means
each of us is shaped by the forces of that process. Our lives and our relationships are shaped by that process. Our realities, our perceptions, our
beliefs and values, and the way we think about ourselves and others are shaped by that process. To end this paper I want to tell one more story. [*406] And, the story I want
to tell comes out of my recent life and is shared with you as a testament to the shaping I have been speaking about.
Our alternative the Coloniality/Modernity lens you should view the plan as opening
questions into the colonial assumptions of development this is essential to find new
epistemologies and to allow Latin America to progress
In short, the perspective of modernity/coloniality provides an alternative framework for debates on modernity,
globalization and development; it is not just a change in the description of events, it is an epistemic change of
perspective. By speaking of the colonial difference, this framework brings to the fore the power dimension that
is often lost in relativistic discussions of cultural difference. More recent debates on interculturality, for instance in Ecuadors current
political and cultural scene, deepens some of these insights (Walsh 2003). In short, the MC research program is a framework constructed
from the Latin American periphery of the modern colonial world system; it helps explain the dynamics of
eurocentrism in the making of modernity and attempts to transcend it. If it reveals the dark sides of modernity,
it does not do it from an intra-epistemic perspective, as in the critical European discourses, but from the
perspective of the receivers of the alleged benefits of the modern world. Modernity/coloniality also shows that
the perspective of modernity is limited and exhausted in its pretended universality. By the same token, it shows
the shortcomings of the language of alternative modernities in that this latter incorporates the projects of the
non-moderns into a single project, losing the subaltern perspectives and subordinating them, for even in their
hybridity subaltern perspectives are not about being only modern but are heteroglossic, networked, plural. In
highlighting the developmentalist fallacy, lastly, modernity/coloniality not only re-focuses our attention on the
overall fact of development, it provides a context for interpreting the various challenges to development and
modernity as so many projects that are potentially complementary and mutually reinforcing. Beyond Latin America, one
may say, with Mignolo (2000), p. 309), that this approach is certainly a theory from/of the Third World, but not only for the Third World. ... Third World theorizing is also for
the First World in the sense that critical theory is subsumed and incorporated in a new geocultural and epistemological location.7 Finally, there are some consequences of this
groups work for Latin American Studies in the US, Europe, and elsewhere. The
MC perspective moves away from viewing Latin America

as an object of study (in relation to which US-based Latin American Studies would be the knowing subject), towards an understanding of Latin
America as a geo-historical location with and within a distinct critical genealogy of thought.
Modernity/Coloniality suggests that globalization must be understood from a geo-historical and critical Latin
American perspective. With this the MC approach proposes an alternative to the genealogy of the modern
social sciences that are still the foundation of Latin American Studies in the US. In this way, Latin American
Studies in, say, North America and Europe, and Critical Social Thought in Latin America (which offers the epistemic
grounding for the MC group) emerge as two complementary but distinct paradigms.8 This also means that, as an
epistemic perspective, the MC research program is not associated with particular nationalities or geographical
locations. To occupy the locus of enunciation crafted by the MC project, in other words, one does not need to be a Latin American nor live in the continent. Latin
America itself becomes a perspective that can be practiced from many spaces, if it is done from counter-hegemonic perspectives that challenge the very assumption of Latin
America as fully constituted object of study, previous to, and outside of, the often imperialistic discourses that construct it.
Epistemology comes first the lens through which we view projects is a prior question to their
political effect only examining discourse can understand the current system
Escobar 10 PhD in Philosophy, Policy, and Planning (Arturo, 12 January 2010, 'LATIN AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS', Cultural
Studies, 24: 1, 1 65, http://www.unc.edu/~aescobar/text/eng/escobar.2010.CulturalStudies.24-1.pdf)
Despite the contradictory and diverse forms it has taken in the present decade, the so-called turn
to the Left in Latin America suggests that the

urge for a re-orientation of the course followed over the past three to four decades is strongly felt by many
governments. This is most clear in the cases of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador ; to a greater or lesser extent, Argentina, Paraguay,
Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador; and in the cases of Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, which make up what some observers have called the pragmatic reformers. Why is this
happening in Latin America more clearly than in any other world region at present is a question I cannot tackle fully here, but it is
related to the fact that Latin America was the region that most earnestly embraced neo-liberal reforms , where the
model was applied most thoroughly, and where the results are most ambiguous at best. It was on the basis of the early Latin American experiences that the Washington
Consensus was crafted. The
fact that many of the reforms of the most recent years are referred to as anti-neoliberal
seems particularly apposite. Whether these countries are entering a post-neoliberal let alone, post-liberal social order remains a matter of debate. There
is also an acute sense that this potential will not necessarily be realized , and that the projects under way, especially in their State form, are
not panaceas of any sort; on the contrary, they are seen as fragile and full of tensions and contradictions. But t he sense of an active stirring up of things
in many of the continents regions, from southern Mexico to the Patagonia, and especially in large parts of South America, is strong. How one
thinks about these processes is itself an object of struggle and debate, and it is at this juncture that this paper is situated. Is it possible
to suggest ways of thinking about the ongoing transformations that neither shortcut their potential by
interpreting them through worn out categories, nor that aggrandize their scope by imputing to them utopias
that might be far from the desires and actions of the main actors involved? Is it enough to think from the space of the modern social sciences,
or must one incorporate other forms of knowledge, such as those of the activistintellectuals that inhabit the worlds of many of todays social movements? In other words, the
questions of where one thinks from, with whom, and for what purpose become important elements of the
investigation; this also means that the investigation is, more than ever, simultaneously theoretical and political.
This specificity also has to do with the multiplicity of long-term histories and trajectories that underlie the cultural and political
projects at play. It can plausibly be argued that the region could be moving at the very least beyond the idea of a single, universal modernity and towards a more plural
set of modernities. Whether it is also moving beyond the dominance of one set of modernities (Euro-modernities), or not, remains to be seen. Although moving to a postliberal society does not seem to be the project of the progressive governments, some social movements could be seen as pointing in this direction. A third layer to which
attention needs to be paid is, of course, the reactions by, and projects from, the right. State, social movements, and the right appear as three inter-related but distinct spheres
of cultural-political intervention. Said differently, this paper seeks to understand the current conjuncture, in the sense of a description of a social formation as fractured and
conflictual, along multiple axes, planes and scales, constantly in search of temporary balances or structural stabilities through a variety of practices and processes of struggle
and negotiation(Grossberg 2006, p. 4). Latin
America can be fruitfully seen as a crossroads: a regional formation where
critical theories arising from many trajectories (from Marxist political economy and post-structuralism to decolonial thought), a
multiplicity of histories and futures, and very diverse cultural and political projects all find a convergence
space. As we shall see, the current conjuncture can be said to be defined by two processes: the crisis of the neo-liberal
model of the past three decades; and the crisis of the project of bringing about modernity in the continent since the
Conquest.
--Development Links
The Affirmative is Trapped in Modernity because it emphasizes Expert Knowledge
development experts teach other nations how to grow, which disregards alternative knowledge
and opens them to domination
The views of Habermas and Giddens have been particularly influential, having given rise to a veritable genre of books on modernity and globalization. From this perspective,
modernity may be characterized as follows: 1 Historically, modernity has identifiable temporal and spatial origins: seventeenth century northern
Europe (especially France, Germany, England), around the processes of Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. These processes crystallized at the end of
the eighteenth century (Foucaults modern episteme) and became consolidated with the Industrial Revolution. 2 Sociologically,
modernity is
characterized by certain institutions, particularly the nation state, and by some basic features, such as selfreflexivity (the continuous feedback of expert knowledge back into society, transforming it) ; the dismembedding of social
life from local context and its increasing determination by translocal forces; and space/time distantiation, or the separation of space and place, since
relations between absent others become more important than face to face interaction (Giddens 1990). 3 Culturally,
modernity can be further characterized in terms of the increasing appropriation of previously taken for granted
cultural backgrounds by forms of expert knowledge linked to capital and state administrative apparatuses
(Habermas 1973). Habermas (1987) describes this process as the increasing rationalization of the life-world, accompanied by universalization and individuation.
Modernity brings about an order on the basis of the constructs of reason, the individual, expert knowledge, and
administrative mechanisms linked to the state. Order and reason are seen as the foundation for equality and
freedom, and enabled by the language of rights. 4 Philosophically, one may see modernity in terms of the emergence
of the notion of Man as the foundation for all knowledge and order of the world, separate from the natural and
the divine (a pervasive anthropocentrism; Foucault 1973, Heidegger 1977, Panikkar 1993). On the other, modernity is seen in terms of the triumph of metaphysics,
understood as a tendency extending from Plato and some of the preSocratics to Descartes and the modern thinkers, and criticized by Nietzsche and Heidegger among others
For
Vattimo, modernity is characterized by the idea of history and its corollary, progress and overcoming. Vattimo
emphasizes the logic of development the belief in perpetual betterment and overcoming as crucial to the
philosophical foundations of the modern order. On the critical side, the disembeddedness of modernity is seen to
cause what Paul Virilio (1999) calls global de-localization, including the marginalization of place (the here and now of social
action) in the definition of social life. The underside of order and rationality is seen in various ways, from the
domination and disenchantment that came about with secularization and the predominance of instrumental
reason to the normalization of life and the disciplining of populations . As Foucault put it, the Enlightenment, which discovered the
liberties, also invented the disciplines (1979, p. 222). Finally, modernitys anthropocentrism is related to logocentrism and
phallogocentrism, defined here simply as the cultural project of ordering the world according to the perspective
of a male eurocentric consciousness in other words, building an allegedly ordered, rational, and predictable
world. Logocentrism has reached unprecedented levels with the extreme economization and technification of
the world (Leff 2000). Modernity of course did not succeed in constituting a total reality, but enacted a totalizing project aimed at the purification of orders (separation
that finds in logical truth the foundation for a rational theory of the world as made up of knowable (and hence controllable) things and beings (e.g., Vattimo 1991).
between us and them, nature and culture), although inevitably only producing hybrids of these opposites along the way (thus Latours dictum that we have never been
modern, 1993).
--Engagement Links
Their focus on the need for globalized development reifies neoliberal systems of domination
Reid-Henry 12 (Simon Reid-Henry, PhD, lecturer in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London, senior fellow at the Peace Research Institute,
10-30-12, Neoliberalisms trade not aid approach to development ignores past lessons, http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/nov/05/arturo-escobar-postdevelopment-thinker) gz
The new right was a broad church. Its ideological home was provided by the governments of Margaret Thatcher
in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US. But its practical levers were the institutions of the Washington
Consensus the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (Gatt, which would later become the World Trade Organisation) and its momentum was provided
by a more general sense of excitement about what is today (far too pejoratively) referred to as globalisation.At the heart
of the new right project was a particular constellation of ideas and policies known as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is often used today as shorthand for
any idea that is pro-market and anti-government intervention, but it is actually more specific than this. Above all, it is the harnessing of such policies to
support the interests of big business, transnational corporations and finance. It seeks not so much a free
market, therefore, as a market free for powerful interests. In terms of development policy, neoliberalism often boiled down
to the belief that an intensified globalisation was itself development , the two being inseparable sides of the same virtuous coin.
Hence, instead of seeing that poor countries would be best served through appropriate targeted policies (limiting
domestic vulnerability to the global market through protectionist measures like tariffs, say, as South Korea was doing), neoliberals claimed that since
global free markets were both the means and the desired end of development the only viable object of
development policy was to do whatever necessary to make local markets and societies "fit" with the new global
imperatives that the rich world's drive to internationalisation was bringing into focus. Accordingly, neoliberal
development policy was both radical and abstract and, like all such prescriptions, was to be applied strictly according to the
instructions. That usually called for several policies. The local state was to do no more (or rather, no less) than facilitate the
conditions for "market society". At the same time, all barriers to foreign investment would ideally be pulled down, the
domestic labour force would be "restructured", industry would be privatised, and the profit motive would
become the organising value of social life. This, in short, was the "trade not aid" approach to development. Get
the market conditions right, went the theory, get that too easily corrupted (if not corrupting) state out of the way, and
social justice and human development would follow automatically. Alas, such an uncompromising approach was always likely to come to
blows if not inflict a few of its own in the real world. And for all that neoliberalist development policy may with reason claim to have overcome some of the problems of
earlier development approaches an
overreliance on the state as the main agent of change, say it soon become clear it
had also ignored their most important lessons. Most neoliberals, for example, were convinced that the structuralism of earlier development
economists betrayed an excessively political bent to which their own, more "scientific" theories were immune.It was precisely this sort of dogmatism that made
neoliberalism itself so much more dangerous than the previous generation of ideas. Too many nations were to
witness this at first hand in the 1980s. First via the rather callous settlement to the 1980s debt crisis that
neoliberals called for (there could be no mitigating factors for third world debt, they claimed: even debt accrued illegitimately by former leaders for personal gain
was to be paid back, plus the interest), then at the hands of the IMF's so-called structural adjustment policies (which frequently used
poor countries' existing debt as a lever for drawing yet more market-friendly reforms out of them).
--Implications - Violence
The affirmatives developmental approach to resolving politics has been tried and failed it
only serves to inflict structural violence on populations while filling the pockets of elites
Nhanenge 11 (JytteNhanenge, ecological and social activist, MA in development and MA in philosophy from the University of South Africa, extremely prominent
theorist in development studies, 2011, Ecofeminism: Towards Integrating the Concerns of Women, Poor People, and Nature into Development, pp 19-22) gz
The official intention with establishing the development program in the South was to increase economic
growth assumed necessary to alleviate poverty. However, there is no evidence that absolute poverty is
decreasing; rather the reverse is the case. In addition, economic growth is declining. For economic growth and
for almost all other development indicators, the 20 years as from 1980 to 2000 of the current form of economic
globalization, have shown a clear decline in progress as compared with the previous two decades. In sub-Saharan
Africa, per capita income fell by almost 25 percent during the 1980s. Investment has decreased with 50 percent, and export has decreased by 45 percent since 1980. The
worlds low-income countries (2.4 billion people), account for just 2.4 percent of world export. External debt has risen from 10 billion USD in 1972 to 130 billion USD in 1987.
Presently the Third World debt is around 500 billion USD. According to Shah, for every one USD the South
receives in aid, it spends over twenty-five USD on debt repayment. In the poorest countries, it is commonly the
people that did not enjoy the money, who are likely to pay the debt. Many development commentators find that lack of development is
not causing these figures, rather development itself has brought about such impoverishment: when development turns
natural resources, which provide a large number of people with decent subsistence livelihood, into industrial
raw materials that benefit relatively few, then development creates poverty . (Ekins 1992; Naidoo 2009; Shah 2009b.)When
development projects use the lands, soils, and waters of traditional people to produce commercial crop and
industrial food for the market, then traditional people cannot anymore live from their natural resources.
Moreover, major development projects often include removal of people from their traditional society into
another social constellation with different norms where they cannot participate. The outcome of traditional
peoples exposure to development is that they lose all, which gave meaning to them in their lives. Before
development disposed them, they were not poor. They lived modest but self-sustaining lives from their
environment. Their communities also considered them useful and productive members. However, when
development diverted natural resources towards economic growth, people became poor and their natural
resources became exhausted. From this, it follows that development destroys wholesome and sustainable lifestyles,
creates scarcity of basic needs, excludes an increasing number of people from their entitlement to food, and
generates real poverty or misery. Seen in this way, development is a threat for the survival of the great majority.
Rather that being a strategy for poverty alleviation, development is consequently creating poverty and
environmental destruction. (Ekins 1992; Shiva 1989, 1990.)One example is the World Bank sponsored Narmada Valley Project in
Indias states of Gujarat Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. The proposed two large dams will displace
200,000 mainly tribal people, with no prospect of giving them fertile land elsewhere . The organization Survival International
suggests that the Indian government has not identified land for resettlement because there is no land available. Other people occupy almost all of the
cultivatable land in the region; the remaining land is too poor for permanent farming. These people will
therefore become development refugees living in the slumps of Bombay, like so many before them.
Beneficiaries from the dam will be the better off landowners, who will receive water for irrigation. The hydroelectricity produced by the dam will benefit the industries and the urban middle class. Experience shows that
the wealth, the increased productivity will create, does not trickledown to the poor. Rather the difference
between rich and poor will increase and poverty will intensify. Provision of drinking water meant to benefit the
poorest people in the most arid lands was a major justification for the dams. It is highly unlikely that the dam
will ever deliver this necessity. (Ekins 1992; Elliot 1994)In 1990, some 70 ongoing projects of the World Bank were
forcibly displacing 1.5 million people. In almost all the cases, the dispossessed will end up impoverished. This is
because the so-called resettlement and rehabilitation process is highly inadequate. In Indonesia, the
KedungOmbo dam displaced 20,000 without compensation. The 12,500 dispossessed of the Ruzizi II dam on
the Zaire/Rwanda border received inadequate compensation. Another example is Kenyas Kiambere
hydroelectric project. BBC News showed the project in April 2005. For the television presenter the project was
an example of how development alleviates poverty by giving local people energy as a way out of their poverty.
Nevertheless, according to Ekins the project displaced 6,000 local people without compensation. (Ekins, Hillman, and
Hutchison 1992.)In order to justify the centralization of traditional peoples natural resources the governments argue that industrialization will not only use the natural
resources but also provide jobs and thus income for peoples survival. However, this is only a theoretical model. Often
industrialists cannot use the labor

of the indigenous people, who in a modern perception are unskilled, and who frequently are also illiterate.
Hence, what industries want is to use the fields, forests, fishes, and rivers on which the people subsist. Thus, in
the name of progress and development, the governments appropriate these resources, hand them over to
owners of industries, who turn them into market goods, which the dispossessed can never hope to buy. (Ekins,
Hillman, and Hutchison 1992.)One should add that even if these people would get work, employment does not necessarily
generate an escape from poverty. Average wages in the US fell with 9 percent from 1980 to 1989. In 1987, 31.5
percent of the working force was receiving poverty level pay. According to the Census Bureau, median
household income in the United States fell to 50,303 USD in 2008, a drop of 3.6 percent. This is the biggest
annual drop seen since the government started keeping records in 1947. In Africa, it is also common that
farmers and industries employ people as daily labors. In this way, they can pay salaries that are below the
official minimum level. The exploitation of poor people, by rich people is a widespread practice in African
countries. Hence, the profit from industries is not benefitting workers; the owners direct the profit to themselves and their shareholders. (Dave Manual.com 2009; Ekins,
Hillman, and Hutchison 1992.)The reason why development cannot alleviate poverty relates to the false trust in the
growth and trickle-down approach. The conventional belief is that economic growth will generate wealth in
society, which eventually will trickle-down to the poor segment, and thus alleviate poverty. The blind faith in this strategy
comes from its ability to make significant improvements in average life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, and Gross National Product. Based on this experience
development aid from the North is directed to increase economic growth in the South. However,
what experts overlook, is the models inherent

side effect of inequality. The distribution of the benefits is extremely uneven. The result is that people with the
most desperate needs experience virtually no improvement in their living conditions. (Trainer 1997.)The growth
strategy has the aim to maximize the rate of growth of business turnover i.e. to increase investment, sales,
exports, and GNP, as fast as possible. The economic experts assume that the increased wealth this produces,
the capitalists will re-invest in society; this will then further increase productivity, and will trickle-down and
enrich even the poorest. In reality, very little wealth ever trickles down. The strategy does result in a rapid
increase of national wealth, but those who are already rich get almost all of it. The reason that the wealth
generated will flow into production of goods, which are attractive for the high-income earners and for export to
the rich countries. Thus, the wrong industries will be set up in the South. Rather than producing simple tools,
cheap housing, and clean water, all of which are helpful for poor people, capitalists invest their resources into
export plantations or car factories. In addition, the rich people in the South often want to spend their money on
Western lifestyles. They therefore import Western consumer goods, rather investing their wealth into social
production. This will not give livelihoods to poor people. Their choice oppositely gives income to the North.
Thus, paradoxically, development aid ends up benefitting the Southern elite and the rich countries in the
North, which provided the initial aid, rather than the poor people in the country who received the aid. Consequently,
the growth and trickle-down strategy is on a head-on collision course with anything that one can call an appropriate development strategy (Ekins 1992; Trainer 1997.) In
this way, development creates a cycle that is exploitative of poor people in poor countries: First rich countries
give aid to poor countries. Secondly, the aid benefits activities relating mainly to the middle-class and the elites.
Thirdly, these people spend their profit on production of export goods or on imports from the rich countries.
Fourthly, in the process the elite use the natural resources of subsistence living people. Fifthly, the traditional
people loose their subsistence, and their governments do not compensate them; these people therefore become
destitute and absolute poor. Paul Ekins (1992) calls it the aid and development cycle. Ted Trainer (1997)calls it inappropriate development.
These developmental discourses manifest themselves in a form of violent imperialism and
militarism, waging perpetual war through the power to let die
Duffield 7 (Mark Duffield, professor emeritus at the University of Bristol, former director of the Global Insecurities Centre, 2007, Development, Security and
Unending War, pp 1-8) gz
Since the end of the Cold war, the
claim that development requires security, and without security you cannot have
development, has been repeated to the point or monotony in countless government reports, policy statements,
UN documents, briefings by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academic works and so on (DAC1997; Solana
2003; DFID 2005b). Such has been the widespreadacceptance of this circular complementarity that it now qualifies asan accepted truth of our time. Since coming into office in
1997, forexample, Britain's New Labour government has consciously placedthe mutual conditioning of development and security at the heartof its international development
policy (DFID 1997). Reflecting
and orchestrating the international policy consensus, numerous speeches and policy
documents have argued that globalization, besides bringing great benefits and opportunities, has also brought
into existence a shrinking and radically interconnected world in which distant and hence nationally
unimportant problems no longer exist (for overview see Abrahamson 20o5). The ripple effects of poverty, environmental
collapse, civil conflict or health crises require international management, since they do not respect
geographical boundaries. Otherwise, they will inundate and destabilize Western society. While building on earlier precepts
(OECD 1998; Collier2000), the moral of al-Qaida in Afghanistan has not been lost onpolicy makers. That is, ignoring ineffective states and vulnerablepeoples opens them to
the risk of colonization by criminal interestsand groups politically hostile to the democratic world (DAC 2003).Gordon Brown, Britains Chancellor of the Exchequer at the
time ofwriting, sums up this worldview as follows.We understand that it is not just morally and ethically right that develop-ing countries move from poverty to prosperity, but
that it is a politicalimperative - central to our long-term national security and peace - totackle the poverty that leads to civil wars, failed states and safe havens forterrorists.
(Quoted in Christian Aid 2004: 2)While
it is accepted that poverty does not cause terrorism, it is argued that it fosters
exclusion and alienation, which terrorist organizations can exploit to garner support, if not recruits. The
consequent policy demand has been that development interventions should better focus on such risks and,
especially, take failed and fragile states more seriously (DFID 2005a). This includes the search for new policy
instruments to strengthen state capacity, provide order and, at the same time, deliver basic economic and
welfare services to the peoples involved (Leader and Colenso 2005). This book, however, is not somuch concerned with development as a series of
techniques andinterventions for improving or bettering others; it is more interestedin examining the role and function of these technologies in securingthe Western way of
life.Foregrounding the liberal problematic of securityAs reflected in the above quote, guiding
current thinking is the assumption that not only

is it the moral duty of effective states to protect and better the lives of people living within ineffective ones, but
such help also strengthens international security. This enlightenedself-interest can also be seen, for example, in the remarks made byTony Blair,
the then UK Prime Minister, on the launch of the AfricaCommission's development report in March 2005. British nationalinterest, it is argued, is interconnected with events
and conditions inother countries and continents. Famines and instability thousands ofmiles away lead to conflict, despair, mass migration and fanaticismthat can affect us all.
So for reasons of self-interest as well as morality,we can no longer turn our back on Africa' (Blair 2005). That Africa iscurrently not high on the list of terrorism-exporting
continents doesnot invalidate this position. Rather, it suggests that
the moral logic linking development and security is an expansive
and universalizing one. Because development reduces poverty and hence the risk offuture instability, it also improves our own security. In justifying thepost-Cold
War phase of renewed Western interventionism, there aremany examples of a claimed enlightened complementarity linkingdevelopment and security (Solana 2003: Bush
2002). Indeed, such claims constitute the ethical canon of today's international activism (Douzinas 2003).The complementarity
between development and security is usuallydescribed as signalling a post-Cold war widening of the meaning ofsecurity. From a concern with the security of states,
international dangers associated with societal breakdown, unsustainable population growth, environmental
stress or endemic poverty are seen as widening the scope of security beyond its traditional focus on military
threats. Often described as prioritizing the security of people ratherthan states, the broadening of security to embrace society informscurrent views on human security'
(UNDP 1994a). Since the risks tohuman security are largely associated with underdevelopment, broadening the scope of security to include the protection and bettermentof
the worlds poor and marginalized peoples establishes its complementarity with development. This widening
of security is usually seen by

politicians, policy makers and academics as a new departure . At thesame time, the complementarity between development and security
isaccepted as unproblematic, indeed, as marking a progressive turn(King and Murray 2001: CHS 2003; HSC 2005). If explained at all, itis presented as reflecting the
humanistic advances that internationalsociety has made, compared with the restrictions of the Cold War(Mack 2002). According to this position, given a lack of political
willregarding underdevelopment, calling for enlightened self-intereststaked on the West's own future and security is an important way ofmobilizing public interest and
commitment.There are, however, many commentators that are uncomfortable withthe increasing invocation of security as the primary means or improv.ing the human
condition and strengthening international society. The
Copenhagen School of International Relations theory, for example, has

drawn attention to the increasing recourse, especially since the end of the Cold War, by politicians, policy
makers and security professionals to a process or strategy of 'securitization' (Waever et al. 1993; Buzan et al.1997: Huysmans 2000).
That is, there is a tendency for such groups todescribe an ever widening range of social trends, conditions and practices through a lens of security. Security from this
perspective is oftenless an objective condition and more the way in which professionalgroups compete for visibility, influence and scarce resources. An important question that
Securitization
draws attention to the dangers and unforeseen political and normative consequences of a too ready willingness
on the part of professionals and gatekeepers to invoke security for reasons of institutional or group advantage.
In relation to Africa, for example, it has been argued that the securitization of underdevelopment is both
undesirable and an inadequate response to the situation (Abrahamson 20o5: 61. 7o). It not only fosters fear and unease, it
tends to divide the continent from the rest ofthe world, favours policies or containment and is encouraging the
militarization of the continent.While such concerns are of great importance, central to this book isthe argument that the relationship between development
securitization raises is not that of more or less securrity, but whether many of the conditions so described should be treatedas security issues at all.
and securityalso has a long genealogy. Rather than being a new departure, itscurrent prominence is connected with the return to the political foreground of a liberal
problematic of security (Agamben 2o05). This fore-grounding focuses attention on the existence of a liberal will to powerthat, in securitizing the present, is also able to vector
across time andspace, that is, bridge the past and present as well as connecting thenational and international. Such an understanding is central to thisbook. While a liberal
problematic of security is well represented in thecontemporary idea of human security, since the beginnings of modernity, a liberal rationality of government has always been
A liberal problematic of security is

concerned with people and all the multiform processes, conditions and contingencies that either promote or
retard life and wellbeing. Itis concerned with securing these biological and social processes in thename of people, rights and freedom. Although largely 'nonpolitical innature, being located within populations, communities and theeconomy, these processes are nevertheless the foundations of good government. Liberalism
embodies the idea of government of the population and the imperatives that are derived from such an idea'
(Dean 1999:113). Securitization raises important concerns over the dangers of a too ready willingness by the state and
professional groups to invoke the exceptionalism of security in relation to a widening range of life and society
processes. This book poses an additional set of questions: whydoes a liberal problematic of security now dominate the political foreground and how does it operate
based on theprotection and betterment of the essential processes of life associatedwith population, economy and society.
within the architecture of post-ColdWar humanitarian, development and peace interventionism?Linking biopolitics, liberalism and developmentIn addressing these concerns,
liberalism is considered as a technology of government involving a specific design or means of strategizing

power. A defining characteristic of liberalism is that it takes people and their life and freedom as its essential
reference point (Mehta 1999). Inunderstanding liberalism as power, it is useful to introduce Foucault'sconception of biopolitics' (Foucault (19756], [1976], [19781).
while lib-eralism and biopolitics are not same, as Mitchell Dean argues, biopoli tics is 'a necessary condition of liberalism' (Dean 1999:
113).Biopolitics is a form of politics that entails the administration of the processes of life at the aggregate level of
population. While the morefamiliar term geopolitics interconnects and interrogates states, territories and alliances, territories come with populations,
livelihoodsystems and life processes. Besides military readiness and the diplommacy of political alliance, since the nineteenth century effective stateshave also progressively
expanded their knowledge and ability tosupport life and help populations realize their optimal productive andreproductive potential. The nature and implications of this
biopoliticalrelationship between states, territories and population has beenneglected by mainstream international relations and developmentstudies alike (Jahn 2005; Biccum
2005). Yet, as will be argued below,since
the beginning of the twentieth century, how groups, communities and peoples are
acted upon in order to support and promote colllective life has shaped and deepened a biopolitical distinction
between developed and 'underdeveloped species-life a distinction that is now integral to racial discourse,
global insurgency and unending war.Biopolitics marks the passage from the classical age to the modernone. Compared with the ancient
right of the sovereign to take life or let live, biopolitics marks a new power: 'to foster life or disallow it to the
point of death (Foucault [1976]: 138). Beginning in the seven-teenth century, this new power over life evolved in two basic forms.The first was a disciplinary and
individualizing power, focusing on thehuman-as-machine and associated with the emergence of the greatinstitutions such as medicine, education, punishment or the
military(see Foucault [1975]). From the middle of the eighteenth century,however, a complementary but different power over life emerges.
This newer form does
not discipline the human-as-machine, it is an aggre- gatting or massifying power concerned with regulating the
human-as- species. It is a regulatory power that operates at the collective level of population (Foucault [1975-6]: 243).
This regulatory biopoliticsfunctions differently from the more localized, individualizing and institu-tionally based disciplinary power. Achieving massified
outcomes also requires more complex systems of coordination and centralization associated with the state.
Regulatory biopolitics emerged out of the statistical, demographic. economic and epidemiological knowledge
through which life was being discovered in its modern societal form, that is, as a series of interconnected
natural, social and economic processes operating in and through population. The multiple factors that are aggregatedwithin a
population appear at the level of the individual as chance,unpredictable and contingent events. Rather than acting on the individual per se, a
regulatory biopolitics seeks to intervene at the level of the collective, where apparently random events reveal
themselves as population trends, social variables and probabilities. The discovery ofthe dynamics of population 'established the
paradoxical position of lifeboth as an autonomous domain and as an object and objective ofsystems of administration' (Dean 1999: 99). Biopolitics attempts to
rationalize the problem of governing groups of humans represented in the form of population. Such problems
are manifest in a variety of locations, including the family, health, housing, education and longevity: they
connect with rates of economic growth, working conditions, standards or living, nutrition and the
environment: they also relate to race, ethnicity, migration and social cohesion: today, probl ems of population
even appear at the level of the genetic make-up of life itself. Biopolitics acts in the interests of collective or
aggregate life through knowledge of the processes that sustain or retard the optimization of the life of a
population' (ibid.: 99).Liberalism is a technology of government that supports freedomwhile governing people through the interconnected natural, social andeconomic
processes that together sustain life. Foucault used the emergence of biopolitics as the terrain on which to situate the classicalliberal problematic of how much to govern. Too
much government -in the form of state planning, for example - and the dynamism and creative potential of the life processes on which freedom depends aredestroyed.
Governing too little, however, risks failing 'to establish theconditions of civility, order, productivity and national well-being whichmake limited government possible (Rose
2000: 70). Since liberalismis not the same as biopolitics it can, importantly, be critical of the excessive disciplining and regulation of population. At the same time,however, it
is dependent on such interventions being effective as a condition of order and liberal government. From this perspective, liberalism is not an historical period, the product of
specific groups or asubstantive doctrine: it is an ethos or government that attempts togovern life through its freedom. At the same time, however, it is consscious of the
disorder that excess freedom can bring. As a design ofpower, there is no essential relationship between liberalism, the rule oflaw or representative democracy. A democracy is
not necessarilyliberal, nor is liberalism of itself democratic: liberalism simply embodies a timeless 'search for a liberal technology of government' (Foucaultquoted by Dean
1999: 120).As
a technology or governing life through its freedom, the absence of an essential relationship between
liberalism and democracy helps to explain the enduring paradox of liberalism. During the nineteenthcentury, liberalism typically
supported the rule of law and democraticreform at home. At the same time, however, it also accepted the necessity of non-representative and despotic forms of imperial rule
overseas(Jahn 2005; Pitts 2003). The
idea of 'development' is one way of resolving this apparent paradox. Just as

biopolitics and liberalism are not the same, development is likewise different. As with liberalism, however,
biopolitics is also a necessary condition of development: biopolitics, liberalism and development are different
but intimately interconnected. If biopolitics uncovers the dynamics of life at the level of pop ulation, and
liberalism seeks to govern life through its freedom, then development provides a solution to the problem of
governing too much or too little. Since the end of the eighteenth century development has embodied a recurrent deference to the theory and practiceof an
enlightened, gradualist and educative trusteeship over life(Cowen and Shenton 1996: 27: Mehta 1999: 191-216). The importance of moral trusteeship to liberalism as an art or
governmentexplains its frequent criticism of imperial violence and excess.However, it was also able to accept colonial nule when the responsibility of trusteeship was deemed
to be humanely and hence effectivelydischarged (Morel 1920). A
developmental trusteeship is a liberal framework of government that

allows the powers of freedom to be learned and safely applied. Once thought to be no longer applicable in a
decolonized world, a liberal conception of trusteeship has once again entered the political foreground following
the renewed wave of western humanitarian and peace interventionism in the post-Cold War period. There hasbeen a
revival of interest in liberal imperialism indeed, an attemptto rehabilitate its self-proclaimed role of protecting and bettering theworld (Ferguson 2003; Cooper 2002; Coker
liberal opinion has widely

supported the West's renewed interventionism (Furedi 1994). MichaelIgnatieffs (2003) book Empire Lite, for example, captures today'sacceptance
of the necessity of a period of illiberal rule abroad.Awakened by the threat of world disorder and led by avowed anti- imperialists,
today's interventionism constitutes a new form 'of ostensibly humanitarian empire in which Western powers
led by the United States band together to rebuild state order and reconstruct war-torn societies for the sake of
global stability and security (ibid.:19). This new empire is being implemented by novel institutional arrangements
and divisions of labour linking donor governments, UN agencies, militaries and NGOs. It promises self-rule, not in
2003). With the exceptionof Iraq, where mismanagement and horrendous violence havedamaged hopes of effective trusteeship,
somedistant future but quickly and within an agreed framework. In dealingwith elites, many of whom are the products of modern nationalism.the intention is that they should
It is imperialism in a
hurry, to spend money, to get results, to turn the place back to locals and get out' (ibid.). For Ignatieff.if there is a problem with
be empowered to succeed. Today'sEmpire Lite is only legitimate if it results in the betterment of peopleand their early self-management.
this new interventionism, it is that it does not practise the partnership and empower-ment that it preaches and is dogged by short-termism and promisesbetrayed.There is also
another and broader conception of trusteeship.Although connected, it lacks the spectacle and immediacy ofIgnatieffs territorial laboratories' of post-interventionary
society(ibid.: 20). Since it is more pervasive and subtle, however, it is arguablymore significant. While also having a liberal genealogy, it is aboutsecuring freedom by
supporting households and community organizations, based on the small-scale ownership of land or property, intheir search for economic autonomy and the possibilities for
politicalexistence that this affords. It is a trusteeship that encourages locallevel self-reliance and self-realization both through and against thestate' (Cowen and Shenton 1996:
5). Such a trusteeship operates todayin the ideas and institutions of sustainable development. It can beseen in the moral, educative and financial tutelage that aid agenciesexert
over the attitudes and behaviour of those subject to suchdevelopment (Pupavac 2005). Although a relation of governance, itnonetheless speaks in terms of empowerment and
partnership(Cooke and Kothari 2001). While
western politicians currently argue that enlightened self-interest interconnects

development and security, for those insecure humans living within ineffective states the reality of this virtuous
circle is, once again, an educative trusteeship that aims to change behaviour and social organization according
to a curriculum decided elsewhere.
This understanding of populations as objects to be manipulated to a desired political end leads

to extinction eventually, all populations will be sacrificed
Dean, 1 (Mitchell, Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University in Australia, States of Imagination, Eds: Hansen and Stepputat, 53-56)
Consider again the contrastive terms in which it is possible to view biopolitics and sovereignty. The final chapter in the first volume of the History of Sexuality that contrasts
sovereignty and biopolitics is titled Right of Death and Power over Life. The initial terms of the contrast between the two registers of government is thus between one that
could employ power to put subjects to death, even if this right to kill was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and one that was concerned with the fostering of life.
The right of death can also be understood as the right to take life
or let live; the power over life as the power to foster life or disallow it. Sovereign power is a power that distinguishes between
political life (bios) and mere existence or bare life (zoe). Bare life is included in the constitution of sovereign
power by its very exclusion from political life. In contrast, biopolitics might be thought to include zoe in bios: stripped down mere existence becomes
a matter of political reality. Thus, the contrast between biopolitics and sovereignty is not one of a power of life versus a power of death but
concerns the way that different forms of power treat matters of life and death and entail different conceptions
of life. Thus, biopoliticsreinscribes the earlier right of death and power over life and places it within a new and different form that attempts to include what had earlier been
sacred and taboo, bare life, in political existence. It is no longer so much the right of the sovereign to put to death his enemies but to
disqualify the lifethe mere existenceof those who are a threat to the life of the population, to disallow those
deemed unworthy of life, those whose bare life is not worth living. This allows us, first, to consider what might be thought of as the
dark side of biopolitics (Foucault 1979a: 136-37). In Foucaults account, biopolitics does not put an end to the practice of war: it
provides war with new and more sophisticated killing machines. These machines allow killing itself to be reposed at the level of entire
populations. Wars become genocidal in the twentieth century. The same state that takes on the duty to enhance the
life of the population also exercises the power of death over whole populations. Atomic weapons are the key
weapons of this process of power to put the whole populations to death. We might also consider here the aptly named biological and chemical
weapons that seek an extermination of populations by visiting plagues upon them or polluting the biosphere in
which they live to the point at which bare life is no longer sustainable . Nor does the birth of biopolitics put an end to the killing of
ones own populations. Rather, it intensifies that killingwhether by an ethnic cleansing that visits holocausts upon
whole groups or by the mass slaughters of classes and groups conducted in the name of the utopia to be
achieved. There is a certain restraint in sovereign power. The right of death is only occasionally exercised as the right to kill and then often in a ritual fashion that
suggests a relation to the sacred. More often, sovereign power is manifest in the refraining from the right to kill. The biopolitical imperative knows
know such restraint. Power is exercised at the level of populations and hence wars will be waged at that level,
on behalf of everyone and their lives. This point brings us to the heart of Foucaults provocative thesis about biopolitics: that there is an
intimate connection between the exercise of a life-administering power and the commission of genocide: If
genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to
kill: it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large scale
phenomenon of the population (1979: 137). Foucault completes this same passage with an expression that deserves more notice: massacres have
become vital. There is thus a kind of perverse homogeneity between the power over life and the power to take life characteristic of biopower. The emergence
of a biopolitical racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be approached as a trajectory in which this homogeneity always threatened to top over into a
Nevertheless, each part of the contrast can be further broken down.
dreadful necessity. This racism can be approached as a fundamental mechanism of power that is inscribed in the biopolitical domain (Stoler 1995: 84-85). For Foucault, The
notion and techniques of population had given rise, at the end of the nineteenth century, to a new linkage among population, the internal organization of states, and the
competition between states. Darwinism, as an imperial social program, would plot the ranking of individuals, populations, and nations along the common gradient of fitness
and thus measure efficiency. However, the series population, evolution, and race is not simply a way of thinking about the superiority of the white races or of justifying
colonialism, but also of thinking about how to treat the degenerates and abnormals in ones own population and prevent further degeneration of the race. The second and most
important function for Foucault of this biopolitical racism in the nineteenth century is that it establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life
(Stoler 1995: 84). The life of the population, its vigor, its health, its capacities to survive becomes necessarily linked to the elimination of internal and external threats. This
power to disallow life is perhaps best encapsulated in the injunction of the eugenic project: to identify those who are degenerate, abnormal, feeble-minded, or of an inferior
race and subject them to force sterilization; encourage those who are superior, fit, intelligent to propagate. Identify those whose life is but mere existence and disqualify their
propagation; encourage those who can partake of a sovereign existence and of a moral and political life. But this last example does not necessarily establish a positive
justification for the right to kill, only the right to disallow life. If we are to begin to understand the type of racism engaged in by Nazism, however, we need to take into account
another kind of denouement between the biopolitical management of population and the exercise of sovereignty. This version of sovereignty is no longer the transformed and
democratized form founded on the liberty of the juridical subject, as it is for liberalism, but a sovereignty that takes up and transforms a further element of sovereignty, its
symbolics of blood (Foucault 1979: 148). For Foucault, sovereignty is grounded in bloodas a reality and as a symboljust as one might say that sexuality becomes the key
field on which biopolitical management of populations is articulated. When power is exercised through repression and deduction, through a law over which hangs the sword,
when it is exercised on the scaffold by the torturer and the executioner, and when relations between households and families were forged through alliance, blood was a reality
with a symbolic function. By contrast, for biopolitics with its themes of health, vigorm fitness, vitality, progeny, survival, and race, power spoke of sexuality to sexuality
(Foucault 1979a: 147). For Foucault (1979a: 149-50), the novelty of National Socialism was the way it articulated the oneiric exaltation of blood, of fatherland, and of the
triumph of the race in an immensely cynical and nave fashion, with the paroxysms of a disciplinary and biopolitical power concerned with the detailed administration of the
life of the population and the regulation of sexuality, family, marriage, and education. Nazism generalized biopower without the limit-critique posed by the juridical subject of
right, but it could not do away with sovereignty. Instead, it established a set of permanent interventions into the conduct of the individual within the population and
articulated this with the mythical concern for blood and the triumph of the race. Thus, the shepherd-flock game and the city-citizen game are transmuted into the eugenic
ordering of biological existence (of mere living and subsistence) and articulated on the themes of the purity of blood and the myth of the fatherland. In such an articulation of
these elements of sovereign and biopolitical forms of power, the
relation between the administration of life and the right to kill entire
populations is no longer simply one of a dreadful homogeneity. It has become a necessary relation. The administration of life
comes to require a bloodbath. It is not simply that power, and therefore war, will be exercised at the level of an entire
population. It is that the act of disqualifying the right to life of other races becomes necessary for the fostering
of the life of the race. Moreover, the elimination of other races is only once face of the purification of ones own
race (Foucault 1997b: 231). The other part is to expose the latter to a universal and absolute danger, to expose it to the risk of
death and total destruction. For Foucault, with the Nazi state we have an absolutely racist state, an absolutely murderous state and an absolutely suicidal
With the Final Solution, the state tries to eliminate, through

the Jews, all other races, for whom the Jews were the symbol and the manifestation. This includes, in one of Hitlers last acts,
state (232), all of which are superimposed and converge on the Final Solution.
the order to destroy the bases of bare life for the German people itself. Final solution for other races, the absolute suicide of the German race is inscribed, according to
Foucault, in the functioning of the modern state (232).
--Implications - Environment
Our conception of development ends biocentrism and focuses on social justice this preserves
the environment and addresses poverty
To sum up, the
Development Plan 20072010 and the 2008 Constitution open up the possibility to dispute the
historical meaning of development, as Acosta aptly put it in the text already cited (2009, p. 12). In many of the countries with
progressive governments in the region, the search for different development models has revitalized political
discussions. In relation to dominant conceptions, the notion of development as buen vivir (a) questions the prevailing
maldevelopment (Tortosa 2009, Peralta 2008), highlighting the undesirability of a model based on growth and material
progress as the sole guiding principles; (b) displaces the idea of development as an end in itself , emphasizing that
development is a process of qualitative change; (c) it enables, in principle, strategies that go beyond the export of primary products , going
against the reprimarization of the economy in vogue in the continent; (d) it broaches the question of the sustainability of the model ; (e) it
has made possible the discussion on other knowledge s and cultural practices (e.g. indigenous and Afro) at the national level. Other
innovative aspects of the plans and constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia include: (a) the notion of buen vivir, as understood by some indigenous
and afro communities, does not assume a stage of underdevelopment to be overcome, given that it refers to a different
philosophy of life; (b) in seeing nature as constitutive of social life, the new constitutions make possible a
conceptual shift towards biocentrism or biopluralismo, within which the economy could be seen as embedded in larger social and natural systems,
following the dictates of ecological economists. This makes possible a novel ethics of development, one which subordinates
economic objectives to ecological criteria, human dignity, and social justice and the collective wellbeing of the
people (Acosta 2009); (c) development as buen vivir seeks to articulate economics, environment, society and culture in new ways, calling for mixed and solidarity
economies (see SENPLADES n.d., p. 47); (d) it introduces issues of social and inter-generational justice as spaces for development principles; (e) it acknowledges cultural and
gender differences, positioning interculturality as a guiding principle (Walsh 2008, 2009b); (f) it enables new political-economic emphases, such as food sovereignty, the
Do they constitute a conceptual

rupture ample enough for the radical changes that the Constitution and the Plan envision? To answer this question, it is
control of natural resources, and seeing water as a human right.21 These are all positive changes. But the question arises:
necessary to point at some persistent problems: (a) there remain a series of contradictory conceptions, including around the role of growth, already mentioned; (b) there is a
lack of clarity about the type of processes needed to implement the Plan given these contradictions; (c) an
overall macro-developmentalist
orientation is maintained, which militates against environmental sustainability; and (d) there persists a strong
individualist orientation, in contradiction with the collectivist and relational potential that underlie the vision
of the buen vivir; this problem is inherent in the conception on the basis of human development based on capabilities.
--Implications - Racism
Questioning Coloniality exposes racism it opens the possibility of new epistemologies
Key notions and themes of the modernity/coloniliaty research program Some of the key notions that make up
the conceptual corpus of this research program are thus: the modern colonial world system as the ensemble of
processes and social formations that encompass modern colonialism and colonial modernities; although it is
structurally heterogeneous, it articulates the main forms of power into a system. Coloniality of power ( Quijano), a
global hegemonic model of power in place since the Conquest that articulates race and labor, space and
peoples, according to the needs of capital and to the benefit of white European peoples. Colonial difference and
global coloniality (Mignolo) which refer to the knowledge and cultural dimensions of the subalternization processes
effected by the coloniality of power; the colonial difference brings to the fore persistent cultural differences
within global power structures. Coloniality of being (more recently suggested by Nelson MaldonadoTorres in group discussions) as the ontological dimension
of colonialty, on both sides of the encounter; based on Levinas, Dussel and Fanon, it points at the ontological excess that occurs when particular
beings impose on others and, beyond that, the potential or actual effectivity of the discourses with which the
other responds to the suppression as a result of the encounter (Maldonado-Torres 2003). Eurocentrism, as the knowledge model that
represents the local European historical experience and which became globally hegemonic since the seventeenth century (Dussel, Quijano); hence the possibility of noneurocentric thinking and epistemologies.
Each of these notions are in themselves rooted in complex conceptualizations that

represent decades of research; even thus, they are of course debatable. There are some other notions, more
peculiar to specific authors but which are gaining currency within the group, that it is also important to
introduce. These include Dussels notion of exteriority and transmodernity and Mignolos concept of border
thinking, pluritopic hermeneutics, and pluriversality.
Resistance to Development is essential to indigenous freedom it Insists on respect for
Indigenous Civilization
One of the most salient processes of the past few decades in Latin America is the forceful emergence of
indigenous peoples in the political scene; this is a process that involves other world regions (see, e.g. Starn & de la Cadena 2008, for the new
indigeneities in various parts of the world). The Zapatista uprising and the election of Evo Morales as President of Bolivia in 2006 did much to put this fact in international
they have
occupied a prominent role in resistance movements, particularly against a free trade agreement with the United States. Over the past two
circles, but the phenomenon goes well beyond these markers. Even in countries like Colombia that have a small percentage of indigenous peoples,
decades, sizeable movements of afro-descendents have also appeared in Colombia, Brazil, and Ecuador. Indigenous and black resurgence bring into light the arbitrary
(historical) character of the dominant Euromodernity, that is, the fact that modernity is one cultural model among many. Critical conversations about modernity have ceased
to be the province of white or mestizo intellectuals, to become a matter of debate among indigenous and black intellectuals and movements in a number of countries. The
These are unprecedented social,

cultural, and political facts. The use of Abya Yala as a self-designation after the II Cumbre Continental de los Pueblos y Nacionalidades Indgenas de Abya
debate has seeped into the public sphere in countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Guatemala, and (southern) Mexico.
Yalacelebrated in Quito in 2004 and the self-redefinition as pueblos originarios, as opposed to the Eurocentric pueblos indgenas, are telling elements in the constitution of a
diverse set of indigenous peoples as a novel cultural-political subject (Porto-Gonc alves 2007 ).
Indigenous peoples and movements have been

able to consolidate a heterogeneous and multiform pole of resistance and of social and political confrontation
that places the indigenous movement as a central subject regarding the possibility of social transformation (Gutierrez &
Escarzaga 2006, p. 16). This assertion has been validated in the last few years, most notably in the creation of the caracoles or Juntas de Buen Gobierno (boards of good
governance) in Chiapas, the events around the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Rainforest, the autonomous movements in Oaxaca (Esteva 2006), the repeated uprisings in
the many summits and

meetings of representatives ofpueblos originarios where this political offensiveand new civilizational project
(Ramrez 2006a) are widely debated. The key elements of this offensive have to do with , first, the defense of the territory
as the site of production and the place of culture; second, the right over a measure of autonomy and self-determination
around the control of natural resources and development; and third, the relation to the state and the nation,
most cogently articulated in the notion of pluri-nationality None of this is free of contradictions . The label pueblos
Ecuador and Bolivia, the activation of smaller but noticeable movements in Guatemala, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, and
originarios, for instance, might situate these societies outside of time and history, whereas the territorial focus tends to constrain indigenous groups in geo-cultural spaces
(Cusicanqui 2008). Bolivian vice president Alvaro Garca Linera (2007b) warns about essentialist readings of indigenous worlds, which he sees as hybrids of modern and
non-modern practices rather than as bearers of non-modernities. But the force and significance of indigenous and Afro-Latin American mobilizations are undeniable.
--Implications Turns Case - Poverty

Empirically Neoliberalism has brutalized Latin America staggering poverty and
environmental destruction even their authors concede
Known as market reforms in Latin America, neo-liberalism entailed a series of structural reforms intended to
reduce the role of the state in the economy, assign a larger role to markets, and create macro-economic stability; among the most important measures
were liberalization of trade and capital flows, privatization of state assets, deregulation and free markets, and labor reforms; some analysts believe that they
have brought about a measure of success (e.g. greater dynamism of some export sectors, increased direct foreign investment, gains in competitiveness in
some sectors, control of inflation, and the introduction of social policies such as those of decentralization, gender equality and multiculturalism). Yet even the same
analysts recognize the high costs of these alleged gains in terms of the growth of unemployment and informality, the
weakening of the links between international trade and national production, greater structural unevenness among sectors of the economy
(structural dualism), tremendous ecological impact (including the expansion of monocrops such as soy, oil palm,
eucalyptus and sugar cane as agro-fuels), a sharp increase in inequality in most countries and an increase in
poverty levels in many of them. By the middle of the current decade, one of the most knowledgeable Latin American
economists could say, there is possibly not a single country in the region where the levels of inequality were
lower [then] than three decades ago; on the contrary, there are many countries in which inequality has increased (Ocampo 2004, p. 74). Infamous SAPs
(Structural Adjustment Programs) and shock therapies brought with them a level of callousness and brutality by the ruling
regimes that reached staggering proportions.5
The impact is re-entrenchment of poverty relations between the North and the South which
inflicts mass structural violence
Nair 13 (Sheila Nair, professor of politics and international affairs at Northern Arizona University, 2013, Governance, Representation and International Aid, Third
World Quarterly Vol 34 No 4, pp 630-52, Taylor and Francis) gz
Placing it in context, Browne suggests that the Western-inspired
development doctrine can be divided into three phases, the first

the beginning in the 1950s and for part of the 1970s when development was conceived as a do-aswe-did process, with aid being premised on investiblefunds, balance of payments support and technical assistance. The second phase, in the 1970s and
1980s, saw the link between economic growth and development being maintained . However, questions about whether growth
one spanning three decadesfrom
wasthe best way to achieve poverty reduction, a focus on basic needs, and concernsover the sustainability of development emerged as a challenge to the dominantparadigm.
The debate over growth versus sustainability and a bottom-up perspective was resolved , according to Browne, in the 1990s
with the ascendance yet again of the neo-liberal market democracy model . Development aid donors now
latched on to the new institutional agenda of good governance and respect for human rights: do-as-we-say,
with important implications for development outcomes .57 The typical laundry list of social goods cited in donor
programmes includes progress towards poverty alleviation, rural electrification, sustainable agriculture,
primary education, ending gender-based violence, and so on.58 The solution to deficiencies in these sectors has been technocratic, fillingin
gaps in the recipient states capacity to provide such services thanks to,among other things, historical legacies, weak or ineffective government agenciesand institutions, and
bad leadership. Policy
conundrums are approached in a rational problem solving manner that views aid policy in
instrumental and managerial terms.59 The ends of development are then narrowed or winnowed down to
quantified targets for poverty reduction, whereas the means have expanded to include, among other things,
good government, prudent fiscal policy, political pluralism, a vibrant civil society and democracy .60Shifting
responsibility to non-state agents deflects attention away from theoverlapping spheres of the public and private, whose bifurcation is neverthelessnecessary for the hegemonic
narrative of what international development aiddoes for both donor and recipient states. This separation
is founded on an asymmetric or
hierarchical ordering of power in the global economy and allows powerful states to maintain the fiction of
sovereignty as functionally equivalent for all states. In other words, as I have argued elsewhere, since postcolonial sovereignty
does not have the same status, by virtue of its very creation it is after all post, and it looks and feels different
even as it mimics the sui generis sovereignty attributed to the Western form of the modern state, 61
representations about good governance are actually more about the failure of the postcolonial state to
simulate sovereignty than they are about its failure to deliver development .Postcolonial states may mimic the
sovereign entities upon whose beneficence and benevolence they depend, but they are typically unable to
overcome their production as crisis-prone, terror-ridden, disease-bearing, anarchic, corrupt, non-rational and
ungovernable spaces in the international aid discourse.62 These states are thus rendered as exceptional spaces
where the sorts of rules governing mature democracies such as those in donor states do not often apply and are
suspended; it is all the more imperative then that they be carefully instructed on the arts and ways of
governing. Manji illustrates the practical effects of this well inthe African context, where recipient states were persuaded to move in the directionof multiparty
democracies even as the state was forced to vacate its role inshaping economic policy to multilateral donors. The result, Manji argues, wasthat far from legitimising any
struggle for basic rights or for greater accountabilityof the State and its structures, it brought into the public domain the seethingdivisions between sections of the ruling class
competing for control of the Stateand explosive tensions of tribalism into the urban context.63 These results, asit were, have been felt across the developing world; in
Southeast Asia, for example,the role of the state has been both ancillary to the role of multilateral andbilateral donors in setting development priorities and promoting
developmentprojects and corporatist in orientation, by seeking to appropriate managementand control of social and economic policies.64 The
contradictions
engendered by deepening neoliberalism under the Washington consensus, and the subsequent realisation that
such measures were actually hurting donor interests, also affect hegemonic representations about the ends of
aid. In one sense, then, governing aid recipients has become critical to the reformulated aid agenda, conveying
a moralistic tone, implying not simply that developing countries have bad governance, but also that the West
is the model for good governance and Western donors are the arbiters of what is good and bad .65Kapoor suggests
that the good has been dropped morerecently as many donors have woken up to these outward faux pas. But Westernaid agencies have nevertheless continued to emphasise
good governanceprinciples in their programme documents and outreach in specific countries. Acase in point is the Australian aid agency (AUSAID) injunctions to
recipients:Good governance requires a high degree of transparency and accountabilityin public and corporate processes. A participatory approach to servicedelivery is
important for public services to be effective Good governancerequires policies to promote broad-based economic growth, a dynamicprivate sector and social policies that will
lead to poverty reduction.Economic growth is best achieved in an efficient, open, market- basedeconomy.66The USAID donor outreach in Indonesia also reveals how this
agency approachesgovernance objectives in that country. Its Indonesia programme sets out itsassumptions for a country strategy in rather explicit terms in a glossy
publicationentitled, A Partnership for Prosperity. These assumptions include the beliefthat the Indonesian government will be reform minded and value technicalassistance
is committed to harmonizing central government policies, rolesand authorities in a decentralized governance system remains committed toimproved service delivery
through better management, coordination and capacitybuilding; and continues to welcome support to non-governmental partners.67 In Indonesia the USAID strategy, like
AUSAIDs, was further orientedtowards representations of good governance and building partnerships withINGOs in the field to sustain aid delivery in a manner that is
efficient andaccountable.68USAID officials interviewed in Jakarta underscored the changingaid environment, including the limitations on what aid organisations such
asUSAID could accomplish on their own. The Partnership for Prosperity sets outsome core policy prescriptions which, if successfully implemented by a politicaland economic
system that is accountable, efficient and democratic, could liftmillions of Indonesians out of poverty. In other words, by the reckoning ofUSAIDs programme developers,
poverty, corruption and social injustice couldindeed be history. Since
these objectives have been in place for decades, it is surprising

that there is such certainty about the soundness of such policy prescriptions for developing countries, even in
cases where by the agencys own standards the record is dismal.
--Implications Turns Case - Venezuela

The alternative solves case Venezuelas plan allows for successful self-development of the
people and solves for economic and social exclusion
The 1999 Constitution shaped the first period of Chavezs presidency; it introduced the key principle of
democracia participativa y protagonica (participative and protagonist democracy ); along with the Plan for Economic and
Social Development 20012007, it reasserted the role of the State in regulating the economy and other important aspects of social life; it mandated State
ownership of natural resources, particularly oil, and it introduced a host of mechanisms for popular participation , especially citizens
assemblies, which brought about intense political mobilization, to this date. The Plan stated a principle of self-development and selfmanagement by popular sectors within a framework of endogenous development and of a popular economy,
largely based on cooperative models.11 To this end, it created local councils of public planning as well as organizations concerning land and local
economies (nuclei of endogenous development, communal banks, cooperative and solidarity economies, etc.), with massive State funding. The Plan also included the notion of
mixed property regimes. To this extent, then, there
have been important changes at the level of development and the

economy.12 Nevertheless, the changes in economic policy have not been completely consistent, except perhaps for a steady tendency towards their radicalization. There
exists an uneasy mixture of private and State capitalisms which seems increasingly untenable in terms of either securing support from industrialists or deepening the reforms,
a path favored by the more radical sectors within the government (Lander 2009, 2007b). A wave of nationalizations have taken place since 2006, including in the cement,
electricity, telephone and steel industries. And although the government shows preference for local and national capital over foreign one, the role of big capitalist groups in the
the government is moving towards an

alternative to neo-liberalism with strong social economy and social policy sectors. The increase in social expenditure has been
socializing economy remains undefined (Ellner 2008, 2009). Progressively, and despite contradictory strategies,
sharp, with funds from the State oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), whose annual expenditures in social programs went from 48 million in the period 1999 2003
to 1.7 billion in 2004 and 2.4 billion for 2005 (see Parker 2007b, p. 66).13 This is a prime example of the utilization of the economic surplus for redistributive purposes, a
feature of most of the progressive governments of the continent. (The extent to which such surplus is efficiently used in policy terms remains a matter of debate, as will be
discussed in the next section.)14 During the first presidency period, new
channels of political participation were created by the

government following the principle of direct democracy. Many of these forms of direct democracy were geared towards popular input in the
design and management of public policies. The most effective mechanism in this regard were the technical committee s (mesas te
cnicas) in areas such as water, gas, and energy; these committees brought together community organizations and state agencies to come up with solutions to the serious
problems of social services in poor urban neighborhoods .
There were also community organizations around urban and rural lands
and property. Another well-known instrument of social policy has been the misiones sociales which have
fostered a high degree of organization in areas such as health, education, employment, and food distribution;
these enabled popular sectors to have access to social services and are considered by many as conveying real
gains by the poor and as contributing to a decrease of poverty and unemployment (see e.g. Weisbrot & Sandoval 2008a, Weisbrot
2009, Fernandes 2009). To this extent, it can be said that the protagonist democracy has worked against the long-standing patterns
of social and economic exclusion.15
--Alternative Modernity/Coloniality Lens

Questioning the developmental discourse of the 1AC opens up social space for change it
creates a Rupture in neo-developmentalism
IV. Ecuador: between neo-developmentalism and post-development Ecuador exemplifies well the tensions
between alternative modernizations

and moving beyond modernity, which in this section I will discuss as a tension between neo-developmentalism and postdevelopment. By neo-developmentalism I mean forms of development understanding and practice that do not
question the fundamental premises of the development discourse of the last five decades, even if introducing a series of important
changes (Escobar 1995, 2009). By post-development, I mean the opening of a social space where these premises can be
challenged, as some social movements are doing. Rafael Correa was elected President in November 2006 with the support of a broad-base political
movement, Alianza Pas. His campaign was based on the concept of a Revolucion Ciudadana and the promise of significant social and economic transformations. Correas
ascent to power was pre-dated by a wave of indigenous uprisings since 1990. These uprisings crystallized in various forms of indigenous alliances among the 14 nationalities
and 18 pueblos in the country. On April 15, 2007 the constitutional reform process was approved by popular vote, with the government party achieving a significant majority
(73 out of 130 asambleistas) in the subsequent Asamblea Constituyente (AC). Installed on November 29 to last for 180 days, the AC resulted in a new Constitution, ratified by
popular referendum in September 2008. The
2008 Constitution is seen as a means to transform the institutional framework

of the State; it seeks to enable the structural transformations needed to advance the social and political project of Alianza Pas and to
bring about a new model of society through a different vision of developmen t, territorialization, identity
(pluricultural), and nation (plurinational). As stated by the its President, Alberto Acosta, in his inaugural speech, the new Constitution is probably the
most important aspect of the Revolucion Ciudadana ... [it has] a fundamental objective: the re-politicization of the Ecuadorian society, reflected in a growing consciousness
on the part of the majority about the need for and, above all, the possibility of change. The new Constitution
states that the goal of development is

aconceptual rupturewith the conceptions of development of
the previous six decades. More than a constitutional declaration, the buen vivir [collective wellbeing] constitutes an opportunity to
construct collectively a new development regime (Acosta 2009, p. 39). For Catherine Walsh, the integral vision and the basic condition of the
collective wellbeing have been at the basis of the cosmovisions, life philosophies and practices of the peoples of Abya Yala and the descendants of the African diaspora for
the sumak kawsay (in Quechua) orbuen vivir (in Spanish). This entails
centuries; they are now re-apprehended as guides for the re-founding of the Bolivian and Ecuadorian state and society (2009a, p. 5). And for Uruguayan ecologists Eduardo
unprecedented biocentric
turn, away from the dominant modern anthropocentrism, that resonates as much with the cosmovisions of
ethnic groups as with the principles of ecology. The Constitutions mandate to rethink the country as a plurinational and intercultural society are equally impressive. All of these authors, however, emphasize the tremendous obstacles to actualize these
Gudynas (2009a, 2009b), the rights to nature, or the Pachamama, recognized in the new Ecuadorian constitution represent an
principles in concrete policies and practices. Moreover, it seems clear that many of the policies implemented by the progressive governments are at odds with the principles of
the buen vivir. The Plan Nacional de Desarrollo 20072010, subtitled Planificacion para la Revolucion Ciudadana allows us to illustrate these difficulties, and the
tensions between neodevelopmentalism and post-development.

Only Examining the Affirmative through the Modernity/Coloniality Lens can question to
dominance of Modernity in thought it opens new possibilities
Could it be, however, that the power of Eurocentered modernity as a particular local history lies in the fact that is has
produced particular global designs in such a way that it has subalternized other local histories and their corresponding designs? If this is the case, could
one posit the hypothesis that radical alternatives to modernity are not a historically foreclosed possibility ? If so, how can
we articulate a project around this possibility? Could it be that it is possible to think about, and to think differently from, an
exteriority to the modern world system? That one may envision alternatives to the totality imputed to modernity , and adumbrate not
a different totality leading to different global designs, but a network of local/global histories constructed from the perspective of a
politically enriched alterity? This is precisely the possibility that may be gleaned from the work of a group of
Latin American theorists that in refracting modernity through the lens of coloniality engage in a questioning of
the spatial and temporal origins of modernity, thus unfreezing the radical potential for thinking from difference and
towards the constitution of alternative local and regional worlds. In what follows, I present succinctly some of the main arguments of
these works.3
--Alternative Rejection
Our alternative is to reject the affirmative as an interrogation of development discourses the
creation of intellectual spaces of dissent is vital to challenge hegemonic thought structures and
actualize productive change
Reid-Henry 12 (Simon Reid-Henry, PhD, lecturer in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London, senior fellow at the Peace Research Institute,
11-5-12, Arturo Escobar: a post-development thinker to be reckoned with, http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/nov/05/arturo-escobar-post-developmentthinker) gz

Escobar's ideas are best summed up in his 1995 book Encountering
Development, which offered much more than an analysis of mainstream development

a critique of the whole rotten edifice of western
ideas that supported development, which Escobar regarded as a contradiction in terms and a sham. For
Escobar, development amounted to little more than the west's convenient "discovery" of poverty in the third
world for the purposes of reasserting its moral and cultural superiority in supposedly post-colonial times. Escobar
felt development was, unavoidably, both an ideological export (something Walt Rostow would willingly have admitted) and a
simultaneous act of cultural imperialism. With its highly technocratic language and forthright deployment of
norms and value judgements, it was also a form of cultural imperialism that poor countries had little means of
declining politely. "Perhaps no other idea has been so insidious, no other idea gone so unchallenged, " Escobar
economics or the sprawling array of development actors and institutions it spawned. It was
sneered.But what exactly did he mean? Surely some planning is better than outright anarchy? Surely, whatever one's political views, when confronted by a world as unequal as
Escobar's argument was a good deal more

sophisticated than such questions allow. The first of these influences was the French philosopher Michel
Foucault and his idea that power is not simply something that (rich, powerful) people hold over others, but is
produced in and through all the things we do even things like helping others. Through Foucault, Escobar
came to the conclusion that development planning was not only a problem to the extent that it failed; it was a
problem even when it succeeded, because it so strongly set the terms for how people in poor countries could
live. Told how to behave, poor people were made subjects of development as much as they were subjects of
their own government.Escobar also sought to channel the insights of the Palestinian literary theorist Edward
Said and his analysis of what he termed "Orientalism". Said had shown how western constructions of the
Orient as exotic and enticing, yet also dangerous, were not merely passive descriptions of other people and
places, they were central to the imaginative production of those places. And they were usually constructed
either as sites of excess (sexuality, say) or conversely as lacking in some fundamental value (civilisation, say). In either case, those
abnormalities needed bringing into line. Development was just a modern way of doing this: a re-enactment of Orientalist
tropes in technocratic guise. Hence it was ultimately a way for the west to manage the rest for their own gain,
only ever allowing poor people a future that the rich could imagine for them. Coming at a time when western universities were in
our own, it is important to try to do something?As a glance at his intellectual influences suggests,
the grip of the postmodern challenge to systems of knowledge, Escobar's post-development critique sparked considerable debate. Coming at a time when mainstream
Escobar found ever more

evidence to support his ideas. As he saw it, the more the development industry claimed to be improving on past
practice as it tramped from anti-poverty to pro-poor to basic human needs approaches the more it
continued to fall into the serious trap of imposing a western agenda on others. But if the first finger that people lift to help is on a
development was beginning to incorporate a softer, more human approach alongside the market-driven solutions of the 1980s,
hand destined to meddle, what are those who wish to see a fairer world to do? While some anti-development writers have encouraged a back-to-the-soil populism in response,
Escobar's answer is again a good deal more sophisticated. For him the answer lies in creating space
intellectual first and foremost for "local agency" to assert itself. In practice this means one of two things:First,
it means encouraging local communities and traditions rooted in local identities to address their own
problems. Not buying into the western development agenda does not mean denying that some societies lack
both resources and power relative to others. This was an argument that Escobar developed in dialogue with
feminist scholars like Vandana Shiva, and it can be found today in such initiatives as the BuenVivir moment in
Latin America.Second, and related to this first, it means criticising any existing distortions economic or
political that limit peoples' ability to develop. Escobar has therefore been highly critical of free trade zones, such as the maquiladoras in Mexico, or
what is happening on a vaster scale in parts of China. Instead, he points to a politics of "degrowth" as a way of addressing some of these distortions.
Micropolitical movements succeed in the context of postdevelopment

Cupples et al 7 (Julie Cupples, department of geography at the university of Canterbury, Kevin Glynn, School of Culture, Literature and Society, University of
Canterbury, Irving Larios, Instituto de Investigacn y Gestin Social, Hybrid Cultures of Postdevelopment: The Strugglefor Popular Hegemony in Rural Nicaragua, Annals
of the Association of American Geographers Volume 97 Number 4, JSTOR) gz
Recent events in Northern Leon have thus created conditions that are conducive to the emergence of a new historical bloc in
Nicaragua (as has been developing in other parts of Latin America). The Achuapaagreementsserve as a reference point for the proliferation of cultural
and political struggle. This has led to the formation of a layer of organic intellectuals engaged in processes of "ideological
diffusion" (Gramsci 1985, 382, quoted in Landy 2002, 167). The new roles adopted by members of AMULEON and RADEL are particularly innovative in this
regard, overcoming
the geographical constraints of the region, touching everyday practical consciousness

through face-to-face interactions, and aligning themselves with an emerging political awareness. These new
cultural, political, and institutional arrangements are particularly significant in the context of multinational
capitalism. They provide an important means of addressing the conditions under which commodities are
produced and sold or in which children fail to go to school, thus constituting emergent forms of citizenship for
social and political actors. The enrollment of once largely ineffective and inactive state bodies such as the
CDMs into new development alliances and "global network practices " (Amin 2002, 395) has given these bodies a new
lease on life, led them to reinterpret their roles, increased their interactions with other state and nonstate
actors, and encouraged them to insert themselves into global politics in new ways. The emergent forms of
citizenship to which such bodies are articulated, engage with and are thoroughly shaped by globalizing and
transnational processes and discourses, but are crucially grounded in a local sense of belonging and of loyalty
to region and community. As Escobar (2001, 165-66) has suggested, "it is important to learn to see place-based cultural,
ecological, and economic practices as important sources of alternative visions and strategies for
reconstructing local and regional worlds, no matter how produced by 'the global' they might also be ." In these new
development processes, Northern Len is reimagined through both its intra- and extra-regional connections and
articulations, which leads us to reject the "notion that 'social relations' are contained at particular scales" (Bulkeley
2005, 884) and to instead understand postdevelopment dynamics as multiscalar (Jessop and Sum 2006). This allows us to
avoid the tendency evident in some critical circles to see the macrolevel of social structures as merely reproduced at the
microlevel of everyday life. We instead see the culture and micropolitics of everyday life as sites for both social
reproduction and for "glimpses of the possible within the present-of potential for something beyond it" (Davies
2006, 224, 235).Indeed, in many ways the culture of everyday lifein Northern Len often comes to resemble de Certeau's(1984) analysis of
popular culture as a set of persistent tactics turned toward the creation of spaces of reimagination and agency within the places
that are constructed by colonizing and controlling forces of one sort or another. Our interest here, however, concerns the
organization and leadership roles undertaken by civil society groups within this tactical culture, and thus differentiates our focus from de Certeau's emphasis on the peripatetic
activities of individuated cultural consumers. For example, RADEL activists promote progressive popular economic literacies in Northern Len communities through the
proliferation of networks of community meetings devoted to wide-ranging discussions of how to reimagine and enact development as an endogenous rather than an externally-
processes sometimes
take theatrical forms, as in the case of a play that toured the region and thematized issues around
neoliberalism and globalization; it was widely attended within the communities of Northern Len and followed by open-ended discussion sessions among
audience members. Other issues explored through such community networks have included the exploitation of the
region by economic "middlemen"; the transformation of subsistence into cash-crop farming; domestic violence
and the relations between economic and gender inequality; and the use of media such as radio, Internet, and
TV to do regional outreach on economic and political issues and to reunite families that have been dispersed
through the deterritorializing impacts of neoliberal globalization . Consequently, there is emergingin Northern Len a new
critical public sphere. It is now commonplace to hear people with little formal education speak very
articulately about development strategies, neoliberalism, and globalization. Similarly, there are large networks of men against
imposed process, and what this might entail in terms of harnessing the region's existing economic strengths and artisanal skills. These
violence throughout the region, where not long ago there was virtually no public discussion of domestic violence
--Epistemology First
Evaluating epistemology is critical to addressing development discourses otherwise the
collapse of democracy and society in Latin America is inevitable nothing short of total
rejection solves
I. Context and some features of the current transformations Some statements about the transformations Let us begin with some statements about the transformations under
it is
not only about social inclusion but about the character of knowledge itself and about culture. Aymara sociologist Felix
Patzi Paco put it succinctly by saying that the social movements in Bolivia are about the total transformation of liberal society
(Chapel Hill, November 17, 2005). What he meant, as we shall see in detail, is the end of the hegemony of liberal modernity , based on the
way that convey the sense of what might be new about them. For Luis Macas, former CONAIE leader, nuestra lucha es epistemica y poltica, meaning by this that
notions of private property and representative democracy, and the activation of communal forms of organization based on indigenous practices. Anthropologists Mario Blaser
and Marisol de la Cadena echo these contentions; for Blaser, the transformations evince cultural-political projects that seem to overflow modernist criteria (2007, p. 11),
which de la Cadena (2008) sees in terms of an ontological-political de-centering of modern politics. Cultural studies scholar Jesus Martn Barbero says that what is at stake
in the transformations is el sentido de lo latinoamericano, of what we share as ethnic groups, regions, or nations. 2 Finally, sociologist
Fernando Calderon
(2008) sees in the present moment a political inflection in the process of sociocultural change and the rise of
un nuevo ciclo historico, potentially leading to a renewal of democracy and of what counts as development. The sense
that the transformations under way entail a rupture with the past was eloquently expressed by President Correa in his inaugural speech by the contrasting of epoch
of changes with change of epoch: Latin America and Ecuador are not going through an epoch of changes, but through a genuine
change of epoch .... [We can] initiate the struggle for a revolucion ciudadana that is consistent with the
profound, radical, and expeditious change of the current political, economic, and social system a perverse
system which has destroyed our democracy, our economy, and our society. (Rafael Correa, Inaugural Speech as President of
Ecuador, January 15, 2007)
Their desire to obviate critical theory replicates the failures of development policy
frameworks of knowledge shape reality
the academic debate on

aid has also been largely informed by assumptions about the instrumentality or utility of aid, aids underlying
normative precepts, its origins in development thought, and its productive or destructive forces or capacities .
Coinciding with aids reformulated vision in the post-Marshall Plan era, andaccelerating Western involvement in the developing world,
Gesturing towardstheoretical concerns, scholars arguments echo policy makers solutions andunderscore the academic and discursive labour of experts in dominant
representationsof international aid. Yet we may also discern contrasting attitudes to aidamong policy makers and academic analysts. According to one observer, theoccasional
tendency of scholars to miss key factors influencing important policiesor events and thereby misinterpret causes and consequences feeds what I haveobserved as a widespread
skepticism of scholarly analysis among aid and foreignpolicy practitioners.12 Another suggests that: practitioners
often do not read what scholars

write, considering it all too often lengthy, opaque, heavily footnoted, and unconcerned with operational
implicationsScholars, on the other hand, read littlethat is written by practitioners and even less that is written for practitioners.13While this apparent lack of interest
on each side of the policyacademedivide in what the other is doing or saying may well be truein the world ofaid this belief seems rather obvious the
theory/practice split articulated in these observations misrepresents the way one position or location informs
the other.14It is also disingenuous to claim that aid policy occurs in some sort of normative, theoretical or
ideological vacuum. Scholars and practitionerspolicy elites, aid officials, bureaucrats, consultantsin the
business of producing and prescribing aid, stake positions shaped by certain beliefs about aids merits and
demerits, and institutional orientations derived from those beliefs. 15 Their prescriptions and dispensations are
expressed within those frameworks of knowledge, and are substantively shaped by ideas refined in policymaking circles, including universities and think-tanks, on how best to eradicate poverty and generate economic
growth. It is hardly surprising then that the mainstream scholarly literature on aid has been dominated by
questions such as: does aid work? Why or why not? How can it be made to work better? The approach of scholars such as
Riddell,De Haan, Lancaster, and Fengler and Kharas exemplifies this line of concernand questioning.16 It should be emphasised that even this type of scholarly literatureon
aid is hardly monolithic or homogeneous but a general consensusamong those who favour aid has settled around the central idea that internationalaid is not the problem.17 In
this view it is the manner in which aid isadministered and implemented by the aid bureaucracy, as well as the conditionsthat impair its effectiveness, such as corruption, weak
state capacity and localmismanagementin sum instilling the values of good governanceamongrecipients that must be seriously addressed and alleviated. In light of the
gapbetween aid flows and delivery and targeted aid outcomes, such
a perspective calls for greatly restructuring the organisation,

administration and implementation of aid, which is seen as the crux of the problem . 18
--AT: Inevitable
Inevitability does not answer our argument we are not arguing that we displace
neoliberalism, but that discussing its potentiality is necessary to displace their discursive
centrality the Alternative is always Under Construction that is a strength not a
weakness
The same with post-liberalism, as a space/ time when social life is no longer seen as so thoroughly determined by the constructs of economy, individual, instrumental
rationality, private property, and so forth as characteristic of liberalism modernity. It is
not a state to be arrived at in the future but something

that is always under construction. Postcapitalist similarly means looking at the economy as made up of a diversity of capitalist, alternative capitalist, and
non-capitalist practices; it signals a state of affairs when capitalism is no longer the hegemonic form of economy (as in the capitalocentric frameworks of most political
economies), where the domain of the economy is not fully and naturally occupied by capitalism but by an array of economies solidarity, cooperative, social, communal, even
criminal economies that cannot be reduced to capitalism (Gibson-Graham 2006). In other words, the post signals the notions that the economy is not essentially or naturally
capitalist, societies are not naturally liberal, and the state is not the only way of instituting social power as we have imagined it to be. The post, succinctly, means a decentering
of capitalism in the definition of the economy, of liberalism in the definition of society and the polity, and of state forms of power as the defining matrix of social organization.
This does not mean that capitalism, liberalism, and state forms cease to exist; it means that their discursive and
social centrality have been displaced somewhat, so that the range of existing social experiences that are considered valid and credible alternatives to what
exist is significantly enlarged (Santos 2007a). Taken together, postliberalism, post-capitalism, and post-statist forms point at alternatives to the dominant forms of Eurocentered modernity what might be called alternatives to modernity, or transmodernity (Dussel 2000). Operating in the cracks of modernity/coloniality, this expression gives
content to the World Social Forum slogan,another world(s) is (are) possible(Escobar 2004). That this notion is not solely a conceit of researchers but that it can be gleaned at
least from the discourses and practices of some social movements and intellectuals close to those movements will be shown in the rest of this paper. I should make it clear that
the argument about the possibility of post-liberal, post-capitalist, and post-statist social orders is at this stage
perhaps more an argument about potentiality (about the field of the virtual) than about how things really are. In this
sense, it will remain a working hypothesis to be further refined and a statement of possibility, and it is offered as such in this paper in the spirit of
discussion. But I should also emphasize that this does not make the trends I will describe less real. It has been said of todays
social movements that one of their defining features is their appeal to the virtual; movements do not exist only
as empirical objects out there carrying out protests but in their enunciations and knowledges, as a
potentiality of how politics and the world could be, and as a sphere of action in which people can dream of a
better world and contribute to enact it. It is in these spaces that new imaginaries and ideas about how to re/
assemble the socio-natural are not only hatched but experimented with, critiqued, elaborated upon, and so
forth.9
Neoliberalism isnt inevitable important parts have been reversed in Latin America
The crisis of the neo-liberal project would have to be qualified in ways that are beyond the scope of this paper. According to Uruguayan ecologist Eduardo Gudynas, many of
the neo-liberal reforms are still in place; in this way, rather than the beginning of a new dream, the transformations brought about by progressive governments might be more
properly described as the dream of a new beginning that is, more rhetoric than reality.6 Yet
some important elements of the neo-liberal

mantra have been reversed. The State is back as a main actor in the management of the economy, particularly
through redistributive policies; and some of the previously privatized public companies have been re-nationalized, most notably in the field of energy
resources. Besides the policy level, it would be important to investigate the extent to which the processes under way
have changed those imaginaries and desires that became more deeply ingrained than ever during the neoliberal decades e.g. ideologies of individualism, consumerism, the marketization of citizenship, and so forth. The impact of the reforms at the social and cultural
levels, in other words, needs to be ascertained.
--AT: Permutation
The perm is inevitably co-opted state action reinforces current conceptions of development
because it remains Eurocentric
This state-centric, dialectical and teleological view of social transformation has a series of novel elements yet
remains within the confines of established Eurocentric and modernizing Left perspectives .30 It re-actualizes
developmentalist imaginaries (Stefanoni 2007). The rest of this section will be devoted to presenting and examining an altogether different
interpretation that attempts to break away from the framework of modernization and the State shared by liberal and Left
positions. These interpretations suggest the possibility of noncapitalist, non-state and non-liberal forms of politics
and social organizations. The approach is based on a different social theory and locus of enunciation, from which there emerges a different view of the struggles,
in terms of movement dynamics, forms of organization, and aims.
Resistance to development must be anti-colonial And anti-neoliberal doing the Affirmative

within the alternative framework will leave neoliberalism in place
II. Argument: alternative modernizations or de-colonial projects? My
argument is the following: The current socio-economic, political

and cultural transformations suggest the existence of two potentially complementary but also competing and
contradictory projects: (a) alternative modernizations, based on an anti-neo-liberal development model, in the
direction of a post-capitalist economy and an alternative form of modernity (una modernidad satisfactoria, in Garca Lineras
phrase). This project stems from the end of the hegemony of the neo-liberal project but does not engage
significantly with the second aspect of the conjuncture, namely, the hegemony of Euro-modernity; (b)
decolonial projects, based on a different set of practices (e.g. communal, indigenous, hybrid, and above all, pluriversal and intercultural),
leading to a post-liberal society (an alternative to euro-modernity). This second project stems from the second aspect of the conjuncture and seeks to transform neoliberalism
and development from this perspective. Let me add two qualifications. First, both
options, I argue, are taking place in some fashion at the

level of both states and social movements; while at the level of the State the alternative modernization
orientation predominates, the second option is not completely absent (as we will see with the analysis of the Ecuadorian and Bolivian
constitutions). Conversely, while the second option can be seen as enacted by some movements, many forms of Left
thinking and mobilization continue to be thoroughly modernizing. Hence the importance of looking at these
options at the level of (a) the State; (b) social movements; (c) the nexus of their interactions . Theoretically speaking, my
question is thus: is it possible to think and move beyond capital as the dominant form of economy, Euro-modernity as dominant cultural construction of socio-natural life, and
the State as central form of institutionalization of the social? If this hypothesis has any validity, we can speak of three scenarios: post-capitalist, post-liberal, and post-statist.
This would require a radical transformation of the monopoly of the economy, power and knowledge that has characterized modern/colonial societies until recently. A basic
criterion to answer these questions and to ascertain the character of the changes is the extent to which the basic premises of the development model are being challenged.
Dont engage the state only autonomous social movements can effectively solve acting
through the state guarantees that alternative collapses into bureaucracy
Generally speaking, then, the
main tension emphasized by independent observers is that between the need to foster
autonomous organizations and the tendency, especially after 2006, to re/concentrate power in the State and, particularly, in the
presidency (e.g. Chavez authoritarian tendencies, most controversially staged in areas such as communications, in ways that many see as reducing freedom of expression).
Will community councils and other popular organizations, such as the well-known technical water and land
committees, be able to maintain their independence from a single-party political movement led by the State?
The struggle is seen as between tendencies to strengthening statism and those for greater transparency,
participation, and popular sector autonomy. Only the latter path could consolidate the Venezuelan experience
as a genuine and novel post-capitalist democratic alternative (Lander 2007a, p. 31, emphasis added). One of the issues most highlighted by
critics is the need for a broad debate on the actual conditions and limitations of the Bolivarian process; this
involves discussions about the possibilities of deepening democracy, and the risks of not doing so. Additional
aspects of the debate concern concrete problems, such as the deficiencies of public management, insecurity,
and corruption. Most conclusions emphasize both achievements and a sense of incompleteness, conflict, and,
above all, partial closure of the process. Coronil summarized it well: No matter where one stands or how one views Chavezs Venezuela, few would
dispute that under Chavez the nation is different; for him, the Chavez regime has sought a different modernity by rejecting
capitalism within a class-divided society and promoting collective welfare through social solidarity within a yet
to be defined socialist society of the 21st century (Coronil 2008, p. 4). For Lander, while the first few years constituted a form of social democracy,
the post-2006 period has entailed a further radicalization, yet one that exhibits a constant tension in the
Bolivarian process between the governments neo-developmentalism with its mixture of State and private
capitalism (referred to in Bolivia as Andean-Amazonian capitalism by this countrys vice-president Garca Linera) and the will of certain political sectors (inside and
outside Chavismo) and social movements to radicalize, from the base, forms of popular power towards a socialist alternative ... the main challenge is how to
imagine a different society; what would constitute a post-capitalist society? (Coronil 2008, p. 4, emphasis added) For this author, the path to this question
lies in imagining an alternative civilizational model capable of radically transforming how the economy and
politics are understood, so as to insure the survival of life on the planet . But the debate on the environmental sustainability of the
Bolivarian model has hardly begun, which constitutes a big gap in the process, to say the least. The Venezuelan process takes us in the direction envisaged by
Lander only up to a limited extent. While it has transformed the development model to some degree, it is still mired in neodevelopmentalism and oil rents. With its anti-neoliberal stances it could be said to be moving on a post-capitalist path (particularly considering the social and
popular economies), but it stalls frequently along the way because of its contradictory political economy. A main question remains pending: Is the State an
effective vehicle for the transformation of society towards post-capitalism and post-development? There are
serious doubts that this is the case. However, it might well be the case that all of the pillars of the process endogenous
development, popular economy, and the new geometry of power anchored in the community councils and other forms of popular power should
be understood as horizons guiding a different path rather than as fully worked-out alternative models. This has been said of endogenous
development in particular (Parker 2007b). As Parker argues, To speak of an endogenous development based on a popular economy
means to discuss a process that is in its infancy (p. 76); and he continues, endogenous development implies the search
for a unique path in that it places at the heart of the project the augmented role of the people as its main
protagonist. ... It is an audacious proposal whose results are incomprehensible to those who have not assumed consciously the need for a radical rupture with the
premises of a society that showed its exhaustion in 1998 (p. 79). Finally, whereas post-liberalism is not on the radar of the State, there are two important developments that
erode cherished liberal principles (at least in its really existing forms); the
first is the introduction of more direct forms of democracy.

The second is the transformation of what could be called the spatiality of liberalism, that is, the commonly held political
division of the territory into regions, departments, municipalities, and the like, and which the new geometry of power seeks to unsettle in principle. It should be added that
post-liberalism seems far from the scope of most popular organizations, partly a consequence of the strength of
the developmentalist oil imaginary with its individualistic and consumerist undertones; in other words, the society
defined by the Bolivarian revolution and twenty-first century socialism still functions largely within the
framework of the liberal order; for postliberalism to emerge the autonomy of the popular sector would have to
be released to a greater degree than the current government is willing to do . As we will suggest with the Bolivian case, only a
veritable society in movement, where autonomous social movements get to play an important culturalpolitical role , might move the
socio-natural formation towards the elusive goal of post-liberalism.
Individual politics solve for social reconstruction state engagement prevents the
emancipation of populations
The uprising, in other words, set into motion a steady process of social re construction from the local and the
communal to the regional and the national. Rather than reconstructing the social order from the heights of the
State (as in the MAS project), the indigenous-popular project goes beyond the State; from this perspective, states are not
appropriate instruments to create emancipatory social relations (Zibechi 2006, p. 25). These interpretations go beyond Statecentered
frameworks to focus on the people mobilized as a multiplicity, and on the actions of a communal social machine which disperses the
forms of power of the State machine (Zibechi 2006, p. 161). The focus of these works is on the practices underlying the uprising and insubordination that
took place in 20002005, including: (a) the autonomous urban struggles of El Alto; (b) communal indigenous rural uprising; (c) the struggles of the cocalerosand other peasant
and indigenous groups in the eastern parts of the country.33 The aim is to show the ways in which non-capitalist
and non-statist forms of selfregulation became structuring principles of social re/ composition. The distinction between communal forms
and State forms allows these intellectuals to make visible forms of self-regulation of social coexistence beyond the modern State and capital (Gutie
rrez Aguilar 2008, p. 18), and to unveil the existence of a society characterized by non-capitalist and non-liberal social
relations, labor forms, and forms of organization (Zibechi 2006, p. 52). The main features of non-statist and non-liberal regulation include
deliberative assemblies for decision-making, horizontality in organizations, and rotation of assignments.
--AT: Development solves Poverty

The Alternative doesnt reject development, only Development discourse we prevent it from
colonizing as the central organizing structure within society
Second, I understand the post before capitalist, liberal, and statist in a very specific manner . For Arditti and Lineras, postliberalism means a state of affairs characterized by hybrid practices, as a result of a partial displacement of the dominant forms of
Western liberalism and the acknowledgment of other social and political forms, such as those of peasant and
indigenous groups. I mean something similar but a bit more. My understanding of the post is poststructuralist. It has been said
of the notion of post-development (Escobar 1995) that it pointed at a pristine future where development would no
longer exist. Nothing of the sort was intended with the notion, which intuited the possibility of visualizing an
era where development ceased to be the central organizing principle of social life and which, even more,
visualized such a displacement as already happening in the present. The same with post-liberalism, as a space/ time when social life is
no longer seen as so thoroughly determined by the constructs of economy, individual, instrumental rationality, private property, and so forth as characteristic of liberalism
modernity. It
is not a state to be arrived at in the future but something that is always under construction.
Postcapitalist similarly means looking at the economy as made up of a diversity of capitalist, alternative
capitalist, and non-capitalist practices; it signals a state of affairs when capitalism is no longer the hegemonic
form of economy (as in the capitalocentric frameworks of most political economies), where the domain of the economy is not fully and
naturally occupied by capitalism but by an array of economies solidarity, cooperative, social, communal, even
criminal economies that cannot be reduced to capitalism (Gibson-Graham 2006). In other words, the post signals the notions
that the economy is not essentially or naturally capitalist, societies are not naturally liberal, and the state is not
the only way of instituting social power as we have imagined it to be . The post, succinctly, means a decentering
of capitalism in the definition of the economy, of liberalism in the definition of society and the polity, and of
state forms of power as the defining matrix of social organization. This does not mean that capitalism,
liberalism, and state forms cease to exist; it means that their discursive and social centrality have been
displaced somewhat, so that the range of existing social experiences that are considered valid and credible
alternatives to what exist is significantly enlarged (Santos 2007a). Taken together, postliberalism, post-capitalism,
and post-statist forms point at alternatives to the dominant forms of Euro-centered modernity what might be
called alternatives to modernity, or transmodernity (Dussel 2000). Operating in the cracks of modernity/coloniality, this expression gives content
to the World Social Forum slogan,another world(s) is (are) possible(Escobar 2004). That this notion is not solely a conceit of researchers but that it can be gleaned at least
from the discourses and practices of some social movements and intellectuals close to those movements will be shown in the rest of this paper.
--AT: No Spillover
Latin America is the Key Starting Point for the alternative it uniquely can reject neoliberal
colonialism because it is the original starting point
LATIN AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS Alternative modernizations, post-liberalism, or post-development? Introduction: the turn to the left and the current conjuncture
Latin America is the only region in the world where some counter-hegemonic processes of importance might be
taking place at the level of the State at present. Some argue that these processes might lead to a re-invention of socialism ; for
others, what is at stake is the dismantling of the neo-liberal policies of the past three decades the end the the long
neo-liberal night, as the period is known in progressive circles in the region or the formation of a South American (and anti-American) bloc. Others point at
the potential for un nuevo comienzo (a new beginning) which might bring about a reinvention of democracy and development or, more radically
still, the end of the predominance of liberal society of the past 200 years founded on private property and
representative democracy. Socialismo del siglo XXI, plurinationality, interculturality, direct and substantive democracy, revolucion ciudadana,
endogenous development centered on the buen vivir of the people , territorial and cultural autonomy, and decolonial projects
towards post-liberal societies are some of the concepts that seek to name the ongoing transformations . The Peruvian sociologist An
bal Quijano perhaps put it best: It is a time of luchas (struggles) and of options . Latin America was the
original space of the emergence of modern/colonial capitalism ; it marked its founding moment. Today it is, at last, the very
center of world resistance against this pattern of power and of the production of alternatives to it (2008, p. 3).
Focusing on Alternative Economic paradigms breaks down modern colonialism Latin
America is key
A proper contextualization and genealogy of the modernity/coloniality research program (MC from now on) would have to await future studies. It suffices to say, for now, that
there are a number of factors that could plausibly enter into the genealogy of this groups thinking, including: liberation theology from the 1960s and 1970s; debates in Latin
American philosophy and social dependency theory; the debates on Latin American modernity and postmodernity in the 1980s, followed by discussions on hybridity in
The
modernity/coloniality group certainly finds inspiration in a number of sources, from European and North
American critical theories of modernity and postmodernity to South Asian subaltern studies, Chicana feminist
theory, postcolonial theory, and African philosophy; many of its members operate within a modified world
systems perspective. Its main driving force, however, is a continued reflection on Latin American cultural and
political reality, including the subaltern knowledge of exploited and oppressed social groups. If dependency
theory, liberation theology, and participatory action research can be said to have been the most original
contributions of Latin American critical thought in the twentieth century (with all the caveats that may apply to such originality),
the MC research program emerges as heir to this tradition. As we shall see, however, there are significant differences. As Walter Mignolo puts
anthropology, communications and cultural studies in the 1990s; and, in the United States, the Latin American Subaltern Studies group.
it, MC should be seen as un paradigma otro. Rather than a new paradigm from Latin America (as it could have been the case with dependency), the MC project does not fit
On the contrary, the MC program

should be seen as an other way of thinking that runs counter to the great modernist narratives (Christianity, liberalism,
and Marxism); it locates its own inquiry in the very borders of systems of thought and reaches towards the possibility
of non-eurocentric modes of thinking. Part I of the paper presents an overview of the current MC landscape. I must emphasize that this is my own
into a linear history of paradigms or epistemes; to do so would mean to integrate it into the history of modern thought.
particular reading of this groups work, from my limited engagement with it and my equally limited understanding. This paper should be read as a report from the field, so to
speak. Part II deals with open and unresolved questions facing the MC research program. Among
these questions, I will highlight gender,

nature, and the need to think about alternative economic imaginaries.
--AT: Alternative Fails

Their Alternative Fails argument assumes their Lens it is only failing if you adopt a
Neoliberal lens
III. Venezuela: elements of a post-capitalist politics With
its strong anti-neoliberal stances, the Venezuelan case of the Chavez era
would seem to exemplify the move to an alternative capitalist and perhaps post-capitalist economy and politics. Many
of the changes introduced by President Chavez through the Bolivarian Revolution and the Socialismo del Siglo XXI surely have an anti-capitalist orientation; this
applies as much to the main anti-neoliberal reforms (chiefly, the nationalization of a number of sectors of the
economy, most notably the control of oil production) as to the support of local economies under an
endogenous development model. Whether these changes can be legitimately characterized as anti-capitalist,
anti-neoliberal, post-neoliberal, alternative capitalist, or post-capitalist is a matter of debate in Venezuela and
beyond; the answer to this question depends in great part on the framework used to analyze development and
the economy. For the purposes of this paper, it is important to discuss the extent to which the changes could be seen as furthering the principle of a diverse economy as
defined earlier.10
--AT: Latin America Wants Development

The affirmatives claim that they represent the wants and needs of those they speak about is
paternalistic and largely inaccurate
Exemplifying this turn is a keynote address by Sylvia Matthews Burwell, presidentof the Global Development Program at the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundationon the topic of Creating global opportunity: from the local to the nationalto the global. Burwells credentials include serving in the Clinton administrationas
deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, assistant to thepresident, deputy chief of staff to the president, and chief of staff to former TreasurySecretary Robert
Burwell reminds her

audience that, rather than presuming to know what recipients need, it is imperative to listen to them in the first
place, since they are the key constituencies of aid agencies. The keynote highlights how representationsof the poor are being reconfigured in
E Rubin.73 Burwells speech explicitly incorporates thecriticisms directed at donors for failing to account for the actual needs of thepoor.
aid discourse. For example:We focus our work on benefitting individuals. There are, of course, manyeffective ways to approach and quantify development but individual
peopleare the lens through which we view and measure success. I have a picture inmy office of a little Senegalese girl named Inday, and shes 18 months old.As you can see
you can kind of see the bucket that shes sitting in. Shessitting in a little blue bucket with her head just peeking over. And I give acopy of this picture to every employee that
starts in the Global DevelopmentProgram. And I send them a note and I say, This is your boss. Most peoplethink theyre coming to work for Bill and Melinda Gates, but This
is yourboss, and I mean it. Every action we take should be for her benefit. Shesthe one that we really work for []If we want our program to have big impact, we need to know
our customers,tooto seek their input, be open to their insights, and to listen andlearn from them Listening carefully helped usindeed, forced ustoquestion our own
assumptions, and opened a new opportunity to sparkimprovements in millions of peoples lives.74 These
comments illustrate some of the lessons

that donors have been forced to acknowledge in an increasingly hostile domestic environment for aid-giving.
But the emphasis on the customer and the individual evoke yet again homo economicus. Her
acknowledgment of the need to know our customers nevertheless assumes a particular form of strategic
knowing and strategic silencing of the other.So while she appears to echo Escobars criticism that the voices of the poor arenot evident in
development discourse, her intent is not to rouse donors to dismantledevelopment.75 She concludes that aid recipients ultimately constitute
their own need and can successfully convey that need to donors. But how might they do so? How is the little
girl in the blue bucket able to disclose her dreams? Burwell may invoke recipients efforts to shape and
modulate the aid discourse and assert their own agency, but her intervention highlights the fundamental
contradiction inherent in being in the position of the donor, namely, how can the donor be an effective
interlocutor? Interventions such as Burwells also cannot give us an adequate answer to questions such as: how
do new opportunities for improvements in development aid come about? By whose authority or standards?
Such donor representations of the recipient appear to generate a more positive outlook on the aid enterprise
but they also reproduce the binary of donor and recipient. Burwells belief that large-scale, lasting change is
ultimately driven and sustained by markets and governments, and that the foundations work must therefore
strengthen and complement those forces, not compete with or replace them may sound like a good idea and a
corrective, but can such change accommodate the desires of the little girl in the blue bucket, if indeed her
desires may be discerned by such an entity as the Gates Foundation? This ten-sion between the market-driven logic of aidfor example,
creating efficientmarkets, systems of management and so forthand symbolic deference to customersor aid recipients discloses the profoundly asymmetric nature of
thedonorrecipient relationship.76 I now turn to the role played by aid partners inthe aid discourse and consider how they complicate the hegemonic aiddiscourse.
--AT: Escobar Bad

Escobars analysis is productive
Nustad 1 (Knut G Nustad, department of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, 2001, Development: The
Devil We Know?, Third World Quarterly Volume 22, Number 4, http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/courses/PoliticalScience/670A1/documents/KnutNustadDevelopmentTheDevilWeKnow.pdf) gz
Escobar (1995), the most profiled writer within this genre, builds explicitly on Foucault in his analysis. He is concerned with
examining how what is portrayed as neutral knowledge about an object creates that object by establishing a set
of relations between its elements. Through this mechanism, a set of procedures that decides what constitutes
valid statements is produced, thereby displacing alternative ways of seeing the world. The political dimension
in this explanation lies foremost in the normalising effects of development discourse. Others have seen a more direct political
agenda in development. A decade ago, NederveenPieterse(1991) argued that development was launched by the Americans to forestall thespread of communism. This was
Truman was explicit about

presenting development as an alternative to communism, the false philosophy which has made such headway
throughout the world, misleading many peoples and adding to their sorrows and their difficulties (Caufield, 1996: 48).
certainly one important aspect of modernisation:in the same speech that according to Esteva and others launched development,
Escobars reflexivity deflects your criticism

Cooper 9 (Jasper Cooper, assistant researcher at Le Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche Comparative en Sciences Sociales, student in social theory and political
science, September/December 2009, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life by Arthur Escobar, International Social Science Journal Volume 60, Issue 197-198,
Wiley Online Library) gz
Escobar is very responsive to the reception and critiques of his work. In Territories he even concedes some ground to the position of his
former interlocutors. One certainly hears echoes of alternative development in the question posed in the conclusion to the section on development where he asks:How should
development be reconstructed to promote more democratic, environmentally sustainable, socially just, and culturally pluralistic societies?He responds with a positive
appraisal of anthropological development, even going as far as to concede thatAnthropology's extended reflexivity, its promise of near-native competence and its claims
Territories features
one of several attempts4 to overcome the former critiques in a considerate and convincing way . In this book, Escobar
implicitly resumes the dispute of two central criticisms of the 1990s.First, the notion of sites contained within the anthrobiological model
contests the claim that post-developmentalists failed to notice the ongoing contestation of development on the
ground (Escobar, 2008, p.171). Escobar maintains his rejection of both development and modernity and, with them,
the globalocentric proclivities of those who would make any compromise in this regard . For Escobar, the importance
of local cultural sovereignty over territory remains fundamentally linked to a protection of nature :For activists,
to superior knowledge based on ethnographic research could serve as the basis for such an articulation. (Escobar, 2008, p.197)Nevertheless,
biodiversity equals territory plus culture there is no conservation without territorial control, and conservation cannot exist outside of a framework that incorporates local
people and cultural practices. (2008, p. 146)In this respect, he
maintains the political allegiance between traditional local culture,

ethnic alterity and the protection of the environment. Second, throughout Territories Escobar aims at disproving the notion
that post-developmental thought lacks a positive empirical project with which to fill the gap left by its rejection
of development. Such is evident in the very structure of Territories. The final and decisive chapter of the book is devoted to
networks, organisationally privileging this concept above the immense themes of identity, capital and nature . In
concluding the chapter on development, having used two case studies to prove the limitations of models of alternative development and alternative modernity, Escobar asserts
that [t]o
deal with these larger contradictions, one must move beyond these levels toward a kind of thinking that
intuits the possibility of alternatives to modernity and so he promises to address further the theoretical
possibility of alternatives to modernity when [discussing] the concept of virtuality in chapter 6 [Networks] (2008, p.
196).
***AFF RESPS***
AT: Development K 2ac

A focus on material change for the poor should be preferred over discursive or philosophical
questions alternatives to development result in quietism and fail to produce true
emancipation
Pieterse 2000 Professor of Sociology Jan Pieterse, sociology professor @ University of Illinois, 2000 p. Informaworld , After PostDevelopment Third World Quarterly 21:2
Post-development is caught in rhetorical gridlock. Using discourse analysis as an ideological platform invites political
impasse and quietism. In the end post-development offers no politics besides the self-organising capacity of the
poor, which actually lets the development responsibility of states and international institutions off the hook.
Post-development arrives at development agnosticism by a different route but shares the abdication of development with
neoliberalism. Since most insights in post-development sources are not specific to post- development (and are often confused with alternative development), what
makes post-development distinctive is the rejection of development. Yet the rejection of development does not arise from postdevelopment insights as a necessary conclusion. In other words, one can share post-developments
observations without arriving at this conclusion: put another way, there is no compelling logic to postdevelopment arguments. Commonly distinguished reactions to modernity are neo-traditionalism, modernisation and postmodernism (e.g. McEvilley, 1995).
Post-development belongs to the era of the postpost-structuralism, postmodernism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism. It is premised on an awareness of endings, on the end
of modernity and, in Vattimos (1988) words, the crisis of the future. Post-development
parallels postmodernism both in its acute

intuitions and in being directionless in the end, as a consequence of its refusal to, or lack of interest in,
translating critique into construction. At the same time it also fits the profile of the neo-traditionalist reaction to modernity. There are romantic and
nostalgic strands to post-development and its reverence for community, Gemeinschaft and the traditional, and there is an element of neo-Luddism in
the attitude towards science and technology. The overall programme is one of resistance rather than
transformation or emancipation. Post-development is based on a paradox. While it is clearly part of the broad critical stream in development, it shows no
regard for the progressive potential and dialectics of modernityfor democratisation, soft-power technologies, reflexivity. Thus, it is not diffi cult to see that the three nodal
discourses identiifed by Escobardemocratisation, difference and anti- developmentthemselves arise out of modernisation. Democratisation continues the democratic
impetus of the Enlightenment; difference is a function of the transport and communication revolutions, the world becoming smaller and societies multicultural; and antidevelopment elaborates the dialectics of the Enlightenment set forth by the Frankfurt School. Generally, the rise of social movements and civil society activism, North and
South, is also an expression of the richness of overall development, and cannot simply be captured under the label anti. Post-
developments source of
strength is a hermeneutics of suspicion, an anti-authoritarian sensibility, and hence a suspicion of alternative development as an alternative
managerialism. But since it fails to translate this sensibility into a constructive position, what remains is whistling in
the dark. What is the point of declaring development a hoax (Norberg-Hodge, 1995) without proposing an alternative?
Alternative development thinking primarily looks at development from the point of view of the disempowered, from bottom-up, along a vertical axis. It combines this with a
Post-development adopts a
wider angle in looking at development through the lens of the problematic of modernity. Yet, although its angle
is wide, its optics are not sophisticated and the focus is unsharp. Its view of modernity is one-dimensional and
ignores different options for problematising modernity, such as reworking modernity (Pred & Watts, 1992), or exploring modernities in the
perspective on the role of the state. In simple terms: a strong civil society needs a strong state (Friedmann, 1992; Brohman, 1996).
plural (Nederveen Pieterse, 1998a). Thus, reflexive modernity is more enabling as a position and reflexive development is a corollary in relation to development (Nederveen
Pieterse, 1998b). In my view post-
development and alternatives to development are flawed premises flawed not as

sensibilities but as positions. The problem is not the critiques, which one can sympthaize with easily enough and which are not specific to post-development,
but the companion rhetoric and posturing, which intimate a politically correct position. Alternatives to development is a misnomer because no
such alternatives are offered. There is no positive programme; there is a critique but no construction. Post-
development is misconceived because it attributes to development a single and narrow meaning, a consistency that does not match either theory or policy, and thus replicates
Postdevelopment makes engaging contributions to collective conversation and reflexivity about development and as such contributes to philosophies of
change, but its contribution to politics of change is meagre . While the shift towards cultural sensibilities that accompanies this perspective is a
welcome move, the plea for peoples culture (Constantino, 1985) or indigenous culture, can lead, if not to ethno-chauvinism and
reverse orientalism (Kiely, 1999: 25), to reification of both culture and locality or people. It presents a conventional and narrow view of
globalisation, equated with homogenisation. At a philosophical level we may wonder whether there are alternatives to development for homo sapiens,
the rhetoric of developmentalism, rather than penetrating and exposing its polysemic realities. It echoes the myth of development rather than leaving it behind.
as the unfinished animal, ie to development writ large, also in the wide sense of evolution.
The affirmatives epistemology is well-grounded anti-development narratives are antipolitical overgeneralizations that disregard material practice
Muller 6 Professor of Geography [Martin, Discourses of postmodern epistemology: radical impetus lost?, Progress in Development Studies 6, Scholar
With the complete deconstruction of development, postdevelopment is, in order to remain consistent, not able to offer any way
to move forward and denies any concept of development invested with teleological character. This leaves the
postdevelopment perspective treading a precarious path: any effort at reconstruction would compromise the
validity of the preceding deconstruction and again assemble a new narrative, whereas refusing to reconstruct exposes it to the criticism
of being nihilist, anti-political or amoral . Notwithstanding this, numerous writings do affirm cultural difference, grassroots movements or the local as
counter-hegemonic elements; yet not as reconstructive moments (Escobar, 1995a, b, 2001; Rahnema and Bawtree, 1997; Esteva and Prakash, 1998). Therefore
postdevelopment parallels postmodernism both in its acute intuitions and in being directionless in the end, as a consequence of the refusal to, or lack of interest in translating critique into construction, as one critic puts it (Nederveen Pieterse,
1998: 361). In 1995 Michael Watts stated that there exists an environment in which capitalist triumphalism and post-modern alternatives have hardened into rigid,
incommensurable forms (Watts, 1995: 61). However, surpris- ingly few outright dismissals of the post- development stance as being irrelevant or useless crop up. Critical
responses often refer to Escobars provocative monograph Encountering development (1995a) and associated works (Lehmann, 1997; Nederveen Pieterse, 1998, 2000).
According to Nederveen Pieterse, postdevelopment shows a fundamentally reactionary nature, where the rejec-
tion of the concept of development equals

an endorsement of the status quo and the cultural uniqueness claim amounts to a compart- mentalization of the world denying any
responsibility between cultures within the scope of such concepts as global citizenship (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000) Similarly,
postdevelopment was met with downright disapproval for its sometimes overgeneralized indictment of the West
and the concomitant technological and political achievements that are thought to have ratcheted-up living
standards at least in some countries. The conceptualization of poverty and deprivation in developing countries as a
purely Western construct was considered an anti-ethical stance and underwent critical scrutiny, as did its celebration
of the local, which tended to ignore other scale levels and local inequality (eg, Gasper, 1996; Corbridge, 1998; Mohan and Stokke,
2000). Postdevelopment was reproached, often though not exclusively, from the Marxist flank, on the basis of substituting realism with
constructivism and its inability to connect discourse to real practice (eg, Kiely, 1999; Peet and Hartwick, 1999; Veltmeyer, 2001).
AT: Development K Defense of Aff

The affirmatives critical engagement with material inequality is a pre-requisite criticisms of
sustainable development must be accountable for their lack of real world change
The quasi-revolutionary posturing in post-development reflects both a hunger for a new era and a nostalgia politics of romanticism, glorification
of the local, the grassroots and the community with conservative overtones. Different adherents of post-development advocate different politics. Escobar opts for a romance of
resistance. The politics of Gilbert Rist are those of a conventionally compartmentalised world. Rahnema opts for a Confucian version of Taoist politics (discussed in Nederveen
Pieterse, 1999). Ray Kiely adds another note: When Rahnema (1997: 391) argues that the end of development represents a call to the good people everywhere to think and
work together, we
are left with the vacuous politics of USA for Africas We are the World. Instead of a politics
which critically engages with material inequalities, we have a post-development era where people should be
nicer to each other . (1999: 24) In the introduction to the Power of Development, Jonathan Crush offers this de nition: This is the power of development: the
power to transform old worlds, the power to imagine new ones. The context is a comment on a colonial text: Africans become objects for the application of power rather than
subjects experiencing and responding to the exercise of that power (1996: 2). Crush comes back once more to the power of development: The power of development is the
power to generalize, homogenize, objectify (p. 22). There is a disjuncture between these statements. While the first is, or seems to be, affirmative, the other two are negative.
Clearly something is lost in the process. It is what Marx, and Schumpeter after him, called the process of creative destruction. What happens in post-development is that, of
creative destruction, only destruction remains. What remains of the power of development is only the destructive power of social engineering. Gone is the recognition of the
creativity of developmental change (cf. Goulet, 1992). Instead, what
post-development offers, besides critique, is another series of

fashionable interpretations. Above all it is a cultural critique of development and a cultural politics (Fagan, 1999). This reflects on more than just development:
development here is a stand-in for modernity and the real issue is the question of modernity . It may be argued that the
power of development is the power of Thesis Eleven. According to Marxs Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The
time has come to change it. Nowadays
the ambition to change the world meets with cynicismbecause of the questionable record of
exercises in authoritarianism, and over modernism
and the utopian belief in the perfectability of society. Yet all this does not alter the necessity to change the
world, nor does it alter the fact that development is about changing the world, with all the pitfalls that involves ,
several development decades, doubts over social engineering and rationalist planning as
including the legacy of social engineering and Enlightenment confidence tricks.
Criticisms of development cant account for material gains essentialist rejection replicates a
primitivist approach that dooms millions to early death
Post-development thinking is fundamentally uneven. For all the concern with discourse analysis, the actual use of language is sloppy and
indulgent. Escobar plays games of rhetoric: in referring to development as Development and thus suggesting its
homogeneity and consistency, he essentialises development. The same applies to Sachs and his call to do away with development: in
the very call for banishment, Sachs implicitly suggests that it is possible to arrive at an unequivocal definition
(Crush, 1996: 3). Apparently this kind of essentialising of development is necessary in order to arrive at the radical
repudiation of development, and without this anti-development pathos, the post-development perspective
loses its foundation. At times one has the impression that post-development turns on a language game rather
than an analysis. Attending a conference entitled Towards a post-development age, Anisur Rahman reacted as follows: I was struck by the intensity with which the
very notion of development was attacked ... I submitted that I found the word development to be a very powerful means of expressing the conception of societal progress as
the flowering of peoples creativity. Must
we abandon valuable words because they are abused? What to do then with
words like democracy, cooperation, socialism, all of which are abused ? (1993: 213214) There are several problems with this line of
thinking. First, some of the claims of post-development are simply misleading and misrepresent the history of development. Thus, Esteva and several others in the
Development Dictionary (1992) refer to Truman in the 1940s as beginning the development era. But this is only one of the beginnings of the application of development to the
South, which started with colonial economics; besides development has an older historywith the latecomers to industrialisation in Central and Eastern Europe, and in Soviet
economic planning. Second,
dichotomic thinking, pro and anti-development, underrates the dialectics and the
complexity of motives and motions in modernity and development. Even though at given points particular
constellations of thinking and policy seem to present a solid whole and facade, there are inconsistencies
underneath and the actual course of development theory and policy shows constant changes of direction and
numerous improvisations. Thus, some speak of the chaotic history of development theory (Trainer, 1989: 177) or the fashion-conscious institutional language
of development (Porter, 1995). Third, post-developments attitude towards real, existing development is narrow. The instances
cited in post-development literature mainly concern Africa, Latin America and India; or re ections are general and no cases are discussed (as with Nandy). The experience of
NICs in East Asia is typically not discussed: the
assertion that development does not work ignores the rise of East Asia and
the near doubling of life expectancy in much of the Third World (Kiely, 1999: 17).
The alternative amounts to an embracement of the status quo results in conservative noninterventionist mentality that allowed apartheid
Douglas Lummis declares an end to development because it is inherently anti-democratic (1991, 1994). Viewing development through the lens of democratisation is pertinent
enough, not least in relation to the Asian authoritarian developmental states. Nowadays development managerialism not only involves states but also international nancial
institutions and the new managerialism of NGOs. All of these share a lack of humility, a keynote of the development power/knowledge complex. In post-development there is
suspicion of alternative development as an alternative managerialismwhich may make sense in view of the record of many NGOs (e.g. Sogge, 1996). So what to do? Emery
Roes response, in a discussion of sustainable development as a form of alternative managerialism, is Nothing (1995: 160). However, as Corbridge (1994: 103) argues, an
unwillingness to speak for others is every bit as foundational a claim as the suggestion that we can speak for
others in an unproblematic manner (quoted in Kiely, 1999: 23). Doing nothing comes down to an endorsement of the
status quo (a question that reverts to the politics of post-development below) . Gilbert Rist in Geneva would argue: I have no
business telling people in Senegal what do, but people in Switzerland, yes.5 This kind of thinking implies a compartmentalised world, presumably split up along the lines of the
Westphalian state system. This
is deeply conventional, ignores transnational collective action, the relationship between

social movements and international relations, the trend of post-nationalism and the ramifications of
globalisation. It completely goes against the idea of global citizenship and global civil society. Had this been a
general view, the apartheid regime in South Africa would have lasted even longer. Under the heading of post
thinking, this is actually profoundly conservative.
AT: Development K Micro-Politics Fails

Micro-politics alone fails
Melkote 1 Professor of Mass Communication @ Bowling Green [Srinivas, Communication for development in the Third World, p. 40
Finally, development communication involves
issues at all levels of consideration. What is possible at the micro (individual

and grassroots) level often depends on constraints at the macro (global or national) and meso (large community or regional) levels. Yet, at the same
time, action at the grassroots may influence higher-level policy and practice. We believe that no useful theory can ignore any level of analysis and practice.
Yet most development communication texts focus attention at one level, therefore, neglecting major issues (and populations) relevant to the process.10 Obviously, we cannot
ignore serious problems of individual and local deprivation while wailing for modernization to be revised. Yet, development
projects may not be able to

empower certain classes of people until larger structures of global capitalism are first addressed . This is clearly
illustrated in a recent book titled Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Bales 1999). The book reports research
estimating 27 million economic slaves globally. These are not people exploited in sweatshops but children and
adults forced to work by violence and threats of violence . The violence and force do not come exclusively from the economic motives of
business owners, but additionally from families who want consumer goods and are willing to sacrifice family members
to get them. For instance, the title of Bales' (1999) chapter on forced prostitution in Thailand is "One Daughter Equals One Television." Clearly, these are
problems requiring interventions at multiple levels. They cannot be alleviated by grassroots projects alone .
There is no post-development world any criticism leaves status quo power structures in place
Pieterse, sociology professor @ University of Illinois, 2000 p. Informaworld (Jan, After Post-Development Third World Quarterly 21:2)
what about the politics of
post-development? Fine points of theory aside, what is to be done? Post-development does make positive claims and is associated with affirmative counterpoints
If we strip away the exaggerated claims, the anti-positioning, what remains is an uneven landscape. Eventually the question must be asked:
such as indigenous knowledge and cultural diversity. It opts for Gandhian frugality, not consumerism; for conviviality, a` la Ivan Illich, for grassroots movements and local
struggles. But none of these is specific to post-development nor do they necessarily add up to the conclusion of rejecting development .
Forming a position in relation to post- development might proceed as follows. Lets not quibble about details but take your points on board and work with them. What do you
have to offer? This varies considerably: Sachs (1992) is a reasonable refresher course in critiques of development. Latouches arguments are often perceptive and useful,
A commonsense reaction may be: your points are well taken, now what do we do? The response of Gilbert Rist is that alternatives are not his
affair.6 The general trend in several sources is to stop at critique. What this means is an endorsement of the status quo
and, in effect, more of the same. This is the core weakness of post-development (cf. Cowen & Shenton, 1996).
though they can also be found in alternative development sources (such as Rahman, 1993; Pradervand, 1989) and are mostly limited to sub-Saharan Africa.
AT: Development K Alternative Fails

Turn Latin American anti-capitalism collapses back into authoritarian socialism
collectivists overwhelmed the Anti-Statists - Venezuela proves
This brings to the fore the
second key question to be addressed in this section: the tension between the autonomy of
social movements and popular organizations and the State. Despite the fact that Venezuela has little history of collective action compared to
other Andean countries, various forms of mobilization, particularly belligerent ones, have steadily increased since 1989.17 During the 19891999 period, these forms of
protest were advanced by diverse social actors who had in common poverty and exclusion . The intense popular mobilization
that resulted constituted what has been called the agenda of the poor, which enabled organizations to open up spaces for participation at the municipal level in order to press
for social services (Maya & Lander 2008). From 19992006 (Chavezs first period ),
various forms of collective action continued to be

practiced, this time by a broad array of actors with contrasting political motivations. Popular sectors supporting the change
process continued with both civic and belligerent forms of action in defense of the Bolivarian process. Middle and upper class sectors privileged belligerent actions against the
government; this increased the social and political polarization of society. The
confrontation among pro-government forces and those

against it was particularly fierce from 1999 to 2004, including the coup attempt of 2002 and the oil strike of 20022003. The closing of
political space came into view with the process leading to the referendum for the reform of the constitution of
2007 (see Lander & Maya 2007, for a lengthy discussion of the referendum and its aftermath). For some, this process entailed a return of the left
subculture of the bureaucratic apparatus and authoritarian socialism in short, directed (not direct) democracy (Biardeau 2007a,
2007b). The top-down process followed for the creation of the PSUV was seen as a step back in the construction of a socialist
democracy (Lander 2008, 2007a). Once again, the Venezuelan State was seen like a magician that makes appear from his hat the illusions and miracles of modernity
(Lander 2007b, p. 1). This well-known metaphor refers to the inextricable fusion of State and society based on oil money (Coronil 1997). The
situation after the referendum was well summarized by one the most astute observers of the process: While the social dynamics of the revolution
are characterized by their vital and open nature, in the sphere of politics , then, there appears to be a sort of regressive
evolution, towards a closing of the space for participation and democratic decision-making. Venezuela , in this sense,
appears to be moving in the direction of a politically less democratic society (Maya 2008b, p. 169).18
The alternative fails post neoliberal alternatives only work in theory, not in practice
This is to say that, whereas
important elements for an alternative State framework have been laid down, it is necessary
to raise the question of the political will necessitated for effective social, cultural, and environmental policies in
terms of buen vivir, interculturality, and the rights of nat ure. As Gudynas et al. (2008) have argued in their provisional yet well-documented
evaluation of the social policies of the progressive regimes in South America, in all of the cases, there is a significant gap and lack of coherence
between pronouncements and the actual practice. The results, in short, leave much to be desired. This gap is not
accidental; on the contrary, it reflects the fact that all of the progressive regimes continue to be trapped in
developmentalist conceptions. This might be an unfair conclusion as far as the Constitutions are concerned, in that the new Constitutions are deeply
negotiated and contradictory documents, open to multiple interpretations and to continued political processes in the development of their normativity. As Coraggio put it, it
seems to me that to demand a coherent discourse from the Constitutions is to ask far more from them than the political process and the transitional character of the period
allows, including the impossibility of anticipating a practical discourse for an epoch which is not yet ours.
The kritik fails leads to empty disengagement that disavows tangible progress
Agrawal 96 Professor of Political Science [Arun Agrawal, assistant professor of political science at Yale University, Peace & Change, Oct 96, Vol. 21 Issue 4, p464,
14p.
In a preliminary, by now well-known, statement, Lyotard characterizes postmodernity as "incredulity toward metanarratives."[7] If the The notion of "development,"
according to poststructuralist critics, has become so deeply rooted that it has successfully divided the world into those who are developed and those who are not. It has made
the transition to the developed state, misleadingly measured in quantitative terms, the overriding priority of social policy (Escobar, p. 213). And it has cast the Western world
as possessing the basic material and scientific means, and technical and human expertise, needed to achieve the developed state. Instead of pursuing development,
poststructuralist critics suggest, the apparatuses, institutions, and mechanisms that create the discourse of development must be discredited and dismantled. Pursuit of
development in Lesotho, as Ferguson documents, only led to the creation of a larger bureaucracy and the intrusion and entrenchment of state presence in the Thaba-Tseka
district. The story repeats itself in countless locations throughout the world. This poststructuralist critique, I want to emphasize, is productive. It points, at the very least, to
what might be interpreted as the unintended consequences of development projects, especially as they have been implemented in different parts of the world. The critique also
goes further. It highlights the importance of greater attention to politics. It questions the necessity of the involvement of a range of bureaucratic institutions in the promotion
of development. It shows the integral relationship between the production of particular types of discourses and the selection of specific countries and peoples as needing a
particular trajectory of change.
Poststructuralist approaches, then, have uncovered previously neglected facets of

"development" that require more insistent and systematic analysis. Beyond this point , however, problems quickly
arise. If poststructuralist scholars stop with critique here, they have offered no program of constructive
engagement. There are two implications to advancing only a critique: what I call the problems of (a) the "empty
critique," and (b) "overdetermination." Yet, if poststructuralists attempt to move beyond simply attacking established notions, they are liable to contradict
the epistemological imperative of their stance. Empty Critique The arguments are rather well rehearsed. Opponents
of the poststructuralists can ask,

"While many of your criticisms are valid, what are your alternatives?" Poststructuralist theorists can answer,
"We only aim to critique." The questioning has a special force, however, because as long as one accepts the real-world existence of
the problems to which "development" is posed as a solution, academic critiques become insufficient. You
cannot replace something with nothing. Constructive engagements with the development project are necessary
because the trenchant critiques of development from poststructuralist scholars arrive at a time when the apparatus
of development is simultaneously in disarray and has gained greater strength . For instance, theorists have pointed to the need to
consider more sympathetically the needs and contributions of indigenous populations, to pay greater attention to local communities' strategies for managing dwindling
resources and contesting state power, to involve and empower marginalized groups, to focus on issues of resistance and domination, or to question bureaucratic control. One
can find these statements even in reports from the World Bank and national planning documents from developing countries--and certainly in the writings of scholars who see
themselves as part of the "development discourse." The bubbling up of such issues has helped disrupt the logic of standard strategies of development. But we also see emergent
themes of a different kind at precisely the same time. The collapse of the socialist economies and the triumph of the philosophy of the market has lent weight to the hegemonic
belief in "getting the prices right" and in the privatization of resources. There is now greater rhetorical valence to assertions that push markets and property as the basic
prerequisites of development. Development discourse thus demonstrates a remarkable flexibility by incorporating the need to consider the interests of indigenous and
marginalized communities as well as issues related to resistance, empowerment, and ecological stress. Considering the absorptive capacities of the development discourse,
Ferguson's theoretically reflective refusal to develop any alternatives to development becomes problematic. His analysis avoids the problem of internal contradiction but falls
prey to becoming an "empty critique." Calling for a disengagement from "development," he suggests that those who are constituted as underdeveloped,
can, and do, fight their own battles (p. 281). But his call to disengage is troubling. If Ferguson means disengaging from the discourse of development, his advocacy rests upon a
belief in the productive logic of critique and counter-critique. That is to say, if one stops engaging development discourses, they would wither away, various subject populations
is
ultimately founded upon the confusion of a purist. It is far more than patterns of criticism that sustain
development processes and the discourses of development. However, if Ferguson is advocating working with counter-hegemonic forces
alone, and agrees that hegemony is defined locally (p. 287), there is no compelling reason to disengage from the state or international development agencies. Given the
enormous power and resources [development agencies] they wield, and the possibilities of discontinuities within
them, giving up on them as lost causes would be to yield too much --just as focusing only on reforming them through critique would be to
hope for too much. Overdetermination The second, more fundamental implication of relying merely on a critique is what I call the
problem of overdetermination or tautological restatement . As already suggested, poststructuralism begins with the assumption that
would find their own ways to contest development and marginalization, and development through state intrusion would lose its legitimacy. But such a vision
universalist notions of progress, truth, and rationality are not persuasive. The crisis of representation that is the hallmark of postmodernity is a function precisely of the denial
of reality and its replacement by text and discourse. All universalist themes thus become problematic and contested, their validity depending simply on their location in
specific discursive formations. The poststructuralist critique of "development," when it seeks to disengage, stops precisely at this point--reiterating its initial assumptions.
"Development" becomes simply a flawed vision of progress. There is nothing in terms of evidence that might lead poststructuralist scholars to a different conclusion. But if this
one could simply have asserted

the complicity of development with power, as an article of faith. One could, then, simply have stopped at the beginning. Recognition of the
twin problems of "empty critique" and "overdetermination" compels poststructuralist scholars of development to pose solutions.
is the point at which one wished to stop, there was little need to have gone through the arguments questioning development:
History proves it leads to conservative economics

If we read critiques
of development dirigisme, such as Deepak Lals critique of state-centred development economicswhich helped set the stage
for the neoconservative turn in developmentside by side with post- development critiques of development power, such as Escobars critique of
planning, the parallels are striking.7 Both agree on state failure, though for entirely different reasons. According to Lal, states fail because of rent- seeking; Escobars criticisms
the net political effect turns

out to be much the same. In other words, there is an elective affinity between neoliberalism and the development agnosticism
of post-development.
arise from a radical democratic and anti-authoritarian questioning of social engineering and the faith in progress. But arguably,
AT: Development K Right to Choose

The plan merely provides the choice to live with energy this solves their imperialism
arguments
Seton 99 [Kathy Seton, graduate of Queensland University in Brisbane, Center for World Indigenous Studies, 1999, Fourth World Nations in the Era of Globalisation
An Introduction to Contemporary theorizing Posed by Indigenous Nations, Fourth World Journal, http://www.cwis.org/fwj/41/fworld.html
Much of the political activism of indigenous nations is directed towards the rhetorical issues that underpin their on-going marginalisation. Their demand for inclusion in
"global civic discourse" (Wilmer 1993:36) directly challenges and deconstructs the meaning of normative international assumptions and values surrounding the concepts of
modernisation, progress and development advanced by the imperialist culture of States: In
confronting and challenging the legitimacy of

policies resulting in forced assimilation, relocation, the introduction of deadly alien epidemics , and the sanctioning of
private violence by settlers, indigenous peoples have targeted the source - the meaning of development itself . For instance,
representatives of the indigenous Yanomamo people in Brazil travelled to the World Bank in the 1980s and
argued before Bank officials that "development can have many meanings. Your interpretation of development is
material. Ours is spiritual. Spiritual development is as legitimate as material development ." (Wilmer 1993:37; see also
Dallam 1991). Indigenous nations do not simply oppose modernization or progress. Instead, they assert the right to
define and pursue development and progress in a manner compatible with their own cultural contexts. They
champion the right to choose the scale and terms of their interaction with other cultures. In order to achieve
and secure cultural, political and economic rights, sovereignty and self-determination have become some of the
most important values sought by the international movement of indigenous nations . The rise of Fourth World theory offers one
of the greatest challenges theorist will have to contend with this century.
AT: Development K Turn

Their construction of development as monolithically oppressive is incorrect and destroys
agency justifies inaction even when supported by a multiplicity of knowledges
Grillo 97 [R.D. Grillo, School of African and Asian Studies, University of Sussex, 1997, Discourses of Development, p. 20-22
While not denying the validity of the idea of a 'development gaze', we should note its limits. Mosse (this volume, p. 280) says, I am not suggesting that development
institutions (irrigation bureaucracies or donor agencies) are the creators of social theory, merely that they constrain and select theory [and] nudge the thinking of their
members in particular directions -...' There
is a tendency - illustrated, for example, by Hobart, Escobar and to a lesser degree Ferguson - to see
development as a monolithic enterprise, heavily controlled from the top, convinced of the superiority of its own wisdom
and impervious to local knowledge, or indeed common-sense experience, a single gaze or voice which is all-powerful and
beyond influence. This underpins what I would call the 'myth of development' which pervades much critical writing in this field. It might
also be called the Development Dictionary perspective, as echoed throughout the book of that name (Sachs ed. 1992). The perspective is shared by Escobar, and to a lesser
extent Ferguson and in a different way Hobart. Like
most myths it is based on poor or partial history, betraying a lack of knowledge

of both colonialism and decolonization, and throughout it reflects a surprising ethnocentrism: it is very much the
view from North America. Ill-informed about the history of government, it has a Jacobinist conviction of the state's power to
achieve miraculous things: the title of Ferguson's book. The Anti- Politics Machine, is an eloquent expression of this. It is also grounded in the
'victim culture'. Rather as those engaged in anti- racist training sometimes argued that there are 'racists' and there are 'victims of racism' (Donald and Rattansi eds
1992; Gilroy 1993), the development myth proposes that there are 'developers' and 'victims of development' (see the
unfortunate souls portrayed on the dust-cover of Crush's edited collection, 1995). Escobar adds 'resisters of development', but there is no other way. Thus the myth
would, for example, have great difficulty in encompassing the wide range of responses and agendas found among
Indian women working in and for development whose work is documented in this volume in the paper by Unnithan and Srivastava. Drinkwater
(1992: 169) points to the 'danger of oversimplifying and setting up a dominant position as an easy target'. Although development is sometimes guided by authoritative,
monocular visions, Unnithan and Srivastava's paper (this volume), along with Gardner's discussion of a major project in a country in South Asia, underline the point that
development knowledge is not usually a single set of ideas and assumptions . Gardner observes correctly (this volume, p. 134) that
while our understanding of 'indigenous knowledge' is growing increasingly sophisticated, that of developmental knowledge often remains frustratingly simplistic. This is
development knowledge is not one single

and recreated by multiple agents, who often have
generally presented as homogeneous and rooted in 'scientific rationalism' . . . [but there is a] need to understand how
set of ideas and assumptions. While . . . it may function hegemonically, it is also created
very different understandings of their work. To think of the discourse of development is far too limiting. To that extent, Hobart is correct to refer to
'several co-existent discourses of development' (1993: 12). But there is as much diversity within the community of 'professional developers' (one of the parties identified by
Hobart), as between them and other stakeholders or 'players' (in Hobart's account, local people' and 'national government'). Within
development there is
and has always been a multiplicity of voices, 'a multiplicity of "knowledges "' (Cohen 1993: 32), even if some are more powerful than
others: as Pettier, this volume, points out, 'a simple recording of the plurality of voices' is never enough. Preston, who has written extensively on development, provides an
interesting way into this subject. Discourses of Development: State, Market and Polity in the Analysis of Complex Change (1994) is an exercise in political theory written
largely from outside anthropology which places the study of discourse less in the work of Foucault than in a wider hermeneutic-critical tradition. However, in broader
agreement with Foucauldian perspectives than he might allow, Preston argues that development discourse is both 'institutionally extensive [and] comprises a stock of ideas
that informs the praxis of many groups' (ibid.: 4). It is not, however, singular. He identifies three discourses of development, each located in the changing political economy of
the second half of the twentieth century. Each 'find their vehicles in particular institutional locations, and of course are disposed to particular political projects' (ibid.: 222).
AT: Development K Escobar

Escobars kritik fails cant make important distinctions and is purely rhetorical, not
substantive
Escobars perspective provides a broad and uneven melange, with exaggerated claims sustained by weak
examples. It is broad in combining vocabularies poststructuralism, social movement theory and development
but uneven in that the argument centres on anti-development without giving any clear delineation between
anti-development and alternative development. It is exaggerated in that his position hinges on a discursive trick, a rhetorical
ploy of equating development with Development. This in itself militates against discourse analysis, caricatures and homogenises
development, and conceals divergencies within development. Escobars perspective on actual development is
flimsy and based on confused examples, with more rhetoric than logic. For instance, the claim that the World Bank stories are all the
same ignores the tremendous discontinuities in the Banks discourse over time (e.g. redistribution with growth in the 1970s, structural adjustment in the 1980s, and poverty
alleviation and social liberalism in the 1990s). And while Escobar and Esteva associate Development with urban bias, World Bank and structural adjustment policies in the
1980s have been precisely aimed at correcting urban parasitism, which for some time had been a standard criticism of nationalist development policies (a classic source is
Lipton, 1977).
AT: Development K Third World

Key to politicizing everyday violence
Gelinas 98 [Jacques Gelinas, Canadian University Service Overseas Quebec Board Chair, Freedom From Debt: The Reappropriation of Development Through
Financial Self-Reliance, 1998 p 18-19
A geopolitical concept: the Third World The expression `Third World' is a useful geopolitical term , hitherto the only one suitable for
designating a heterogeneous group of underdeveloped, misdeveloped and developing countries, regardless of their socio-political system and their degree of socio-economic
progress. It
was coined by Alfred Sauvy, a renowned French demographer, in an article entitled `Trois mondes, une planete' (`Three Worlds, One Earth'),
readily speak of the two worlds, the possible war between them, their coexistence,
and so on, all too often forgetting that a third world also exists , the most important one and, after all, the first to appear. It consists
of all those countries that, in United Nations style, are called underdeveloped. [...] And should it cast its bright glow over the first world, perhaps
the latter, apart from any human solidarity, would not remain insensitive to its slow and irresistible, humble and fierce thrust towards life. After all, ignored,
exploited and despised, just as the Third Estate was, this Third World also wants to become something. This
ingenious play on words, likening the situation of the underdeveloped countries to the condition of the
excluded classes of France's ancien regime, has the merit of putting the underdevelopment problem in the right
context: the political field. It positions the underdeveloped countries geopolitically in relation to the two
hegemonic camps that emerged from the Second World War: the club of industrialized capitalist countries and the bloc of Central and Eastern European socialist
regimes. On the fringes of these two worlds is the Third World which, it is true, has never succeeded in forming a bloc. Despite the collapse of communism, the term is
still valid. First of all, its main connotations remain: exclusion, dependence, exploitation. The term's inherent
meaning still fits the reality of underdeveloped countries . Second, most of the Eastern European countries, formerly grouped under the
published on 14 August 1952 in L'Observateur. We
socialist banner, continue to form a separate category in the official nomenclatures of the United Nations and international financial institutions. They still constitute a Second
World between the First, which refuses to integrate them on an equal footing, and the Third, whose stigmata they refuse.
This is particularly true in the context of development

Escobar plays
games of rhetoric: in referring to development as `Development' and thus suggesting its homogeneity and
consistency, he essentialises `development'. The same applies to Sachs and his call to do away with development: `in the very
call for banishment, Sachs implicitly suggests that it is possible to arrive at an unequivocal definition' (Crush, 1996: 3).
Apparently this kind of essentialising of `development' is necessary in order to arrive at the radical repudiation of
development, and without this anti-development pathos, the post-development perspective loses its foundation. At times one has the impression that postdevelopment turns on a language game rather than an analysis. Attending a conference entitled `Towards a post-development age', Anisur
Rahman reacted as follows: `I was struck by the intensity with which the very notion of "development" was attacked . . . I submitted that I found the
word "development" to be a very powerful means of expressing the conception of societal progress as the
flowering of people's creativity. Must we abandon valuable words because they are abused? What to do then
with words like democracy, cooperation, socialism, all of which are abused? ' (1993: 213-214)
Post-development thinking is fundamentally uneven. For all the concern with discourse analysis, the actual use of language is sloppy and indulgent.
Dont reject it just because its been misused in the past

Tucker 92 Professor of Sociology [ The Myth of Development: A Critique of a Eurocentric Discourse. Critical Development Theory. Eds.
Ronaldo Munck, and Denis O'Hearn p.15.
Some scholars have argued that we must abandon the concept of development because of its use in legitimating
domination. If we were to follow this logic we would also need to abandon concepts such as socialism, cooperation,
and democracy because they have also been abused and manipulated for purposes of domination and
exploitation. This would amount to handing over a powerful tool to those who exploit it for their own purposes .
AT: Development K Dirty Word Poverty

The poverty frame is essential to mobilize progressive politics, alternatives dont have the same
effect on social change the permutation which keeps poverty rhetoric is best
Halpin 7 Senior Fellow @ CAP [John, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Reducing Poverty is the Right Goal 4/26,
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/halpin_poverty.html
Poverty
reduction is an essential vision and organizing tool for groups ranging from Call to Renewal and Catholic Charities in the faith community,
There are some voices in the progressive world that disagree with the Center for American Progress national strategy to cut poverty in half in a decade.
to ACORN and the AFL-CIO on the community activist and labor side, to Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Antonio Villaraigosa and presidential candidate John Edwards in the
political world. Yet
these voices believe that progressives should stop talking about poverty and start talking about
social inclusion. What is social inclusion? In the words of its proponents: Social inclusion is based on the belief that we all fare better when no one is left to fall too
far behind and the economy works for everyone. Social inclusion simultaneously incorporates multiple dimensions of well-being. It is achieved when all have the opportunity
and resources necessary to participate fully in economic, social, and cultural activities which are considered the societal norm. At
an abstract level, the ideas

behind social inclusion are important and our Poverty Task Force recognizes that progressives need to broaden
their poverty focus beyond income to include a range of issues that keep people out of the social mainstream. It is somewhat baffling, however,
to argue that progressives should scrap a poverty reduction goal altogether . Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon
Brown have committed the United Kingdom to a goal of ending child poverty by 2020 and halving it by 2010. They recognize how important it is to have a quantifiable end
point in order to assess progress. They also talk about the need to address social exclusion. Since the United Kingdom finds no compelling reason to choose one approach over
the other, why should American progressives? More importantly, although a
social inclusion approach might work well in Europe, which has a long history of
a highly problematic communications approach to adopt in an American setting .
The time and money necessary to educate Americans about social inclusiona term that even its proponents
fail to define in a coherent and measurable way in their own documentswould be far better spent organizing
people around a concrete goal of poverty reduction built on proven and pragmatic policy steps outlined by CAP and others. Replacing a
word with thousands of years of moral meaning with a hopelessly vague and confusing term grounded in
sociological theory and 1970s French social activism is neither sound strategy nor good public
communications. 1. Equivocating on a core moral principle is the height of political weakness . Maybe Im just an oldsocial democracy and class organizing, it is
school Catholic, but where I come from the First Beatitude doesnt start with, Blessed are the socially excluded in spirit. Preferential treatment of the poor is a time-honored
progressive value. Our
nations democratic and faith traditionsgrounded in notions of essential human dignity and
equal worthrequire us to do more to serve and uplift the least fortunate among us. While we must take steps to help all
citizens, progressives throughout history have always maintained that the poor and disadvantaged require extra protections and assistance. Denying the realities
of povertyor reframing our commitment to the poor as a commitment to something more nebulous and
confusingsignals a total lack of conviction and overall timidity. Social reform movements invariably start
from and are sustained by an overwhelming moral desire to correct a grave and identifiable injustice in society .
If progressives are unwilling to say that 37 million people living in poverty in a $13 trillion economy is an egregious national shame, then we should all just pack up shop and
go work for a hedge fund. 2. Avoiding
the word poverty because it might conjure up right-wing lies about the poor is no
way to organize a progressive agenda. The argument of the dont-talk-about-poverty anti-poverty crowd is
built on two misleading claims: one, that the American public is horribly corrupted by conservative themes
about the lazy, undeserving poor; and two, that because of these images, there is little public will to combat
poverty. Both of these claims are drastically overstated and are based on a misreading of public opinion data .
Although it is true that Americans worry about the dependence of the poor on government (a sentiment that has declined noticeably since the early 1990s), this does not limit
public support for doing more to help the most vulnerable. Similarly, Americans expect the poor to do their part and find work, but they understand that larger economic
forces frequently prevent the poor from earning enough to get ahead. A
2007 Pew pollselectively cited in criticisms of the CAP approachshows strong

support for a governmental safety net and increasing worries about economic inequality . Roughly seven in 10 Americans
believe that the government has a responsibility to take care of people who cant take care of themselvesthe highest level of agreement since the early 1990s. And the Pew
poll shows that 63 percent of Americans who believe the poor are too dependent on government also maintain that the government has a responsibility to the most vulnerable.
Fifty-four percent of Americans believe that government should expand aid to the poor, even if it means we have to go deeper into debtstable from 2003 but still at the
highest level of agreement since 1994. And nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that today its really true that the rich are getting richer while the poor get poorera
strongly held sentiment over the past 20 years. Most Americans also understand that the poor do workand share the same values as other Americansbut that they do not
make enough to stay ahead. Sixty-one percent of respondents in a 2001 NPR/Kaiser/Kennedy School poll on poverty said that most poor people in the United States are
people who work but cant earn enough money. Fifty-four percent of Americans said that too many jobs being part-time or low wage is a major cause of poverty, compared
to 46 percent who said the welfare system is a major cause. Additionally, 67 percent said that poor people have the same moral values as other Americans while only 21
percent said the poor have lower moral values. I am not nave about the limits of the publics good will or the ease with which people demonize the poor. But public opinion on
Regardless of
the framing, the public strongly supports the elements of a poverty reduction plan. The advice that progressives
should avoid the word poverty assumes that it will be difficult to build support for specific recommendations
because the framing is faulty. In fact, the exact opposite is true . The public strongly supports the core recommendations in the CAP Task
poverty is complicated, and these and other attitudes directly contradict the assertion that Americans hold immutable and negative views of the poor. 3.
Force reportprimarily the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, minimum wage, and child care support proposalsand also supports additional steps that would
dramatically improve the lives of the poor and help expand the middle class. CAPs polling on tax reform from 2004 shows overwhelming majorities of Americans saying that
enhancing the EITC and the Child Tax Credit should be major priorities for tax reform (80 and 86 percent, respectively). Support is also extremely high for increasing the
minimum wage (83 percent in Gallup polling) and there is strong majority backing of expanded child care for working families according to polling done by the National
Center for Children in Poverty. As our Task Force report shows, these four recommendations alone would reduce poverty by 26 percent. Steps to encourage savings, fight
predatory lending, and increase financial education for low-income families are also highly regarded by the public. And we know there is broad support for universal health
care and enhanced early childhood education. These are all proven solutions for reducing poverty and strengthening the middle class.
Given the totality of the
empirical evidence and the known limitations of introducing confusing terms into public discourse, there is no
compelling reason to replace a poverty reduction approach with an unproven social inclusion approach. We can
at minimum talk about both. It makes far more sense in the near term to organize around proven language and
to state clearly to Americans that poverty is wrong, counterproductive on moral and economic grounds, and
should be reduced. Progressives should focus less on reframing their core principles and more on building the political will necessary to turn pragmatic and
popular policies into real help for the poor.
Abandoning representations of poverty lets the government off the hook justifies unending
conservativism and avoidance
Hanson 97 Professor of Anthropology @ Kansas [Allan, HOW POVERTY LOST ITS MEANING, CATO JOURNAL, 17.2, Scholar
We are suspended in the disjuncture between the ideas that social reality is a human creation and that human beings, acting collectively, cannot control what happens in that
reality. This impasse accounts for much in our current condition, including why poverty has lost its meaning. Poverty is clearly something of our own doing, but the non-poor
are no longer moved to take concerted action to alleviate it. This is not because they think the solution is too difficult or expensive, but because they have lost confidence that
any large-scale plan will work. They may, of course, lend assistance on a personal level, doing good in minute particulars. But the notion that this can be part of a program with
more cosmic meaning, a program that promises to eradicate poverty for once and for all, founders on the apprehension that humans exercise very little control over the course
of development of the social reality they themselves have created. Not everyone, of course, is willing to live with this uncomfortable and paralyzing combination of ideas.
Religious faithful who seek to tailor themselves to a God-given reality persist, as do social reformers who seek to tailor reality to a Utopian vision. But if the growing
indifference to poverty is any guide, it points to the conclusion that these groups no longer represent majority opinion or sway public policy, Those among the non-poor who
are unmotivated to grapple with a problem for which they can discern no solution find it more bearable simply not to think about it. This choice includes ordering where they
live, where their children go to school, what they read, and what they expose themselves to in such a way that poor people intrude minimally upon their lives and
consciousness. Actually, this
strategy does entail a solution of sorts to the problem of poverty , and a remarkably clean and cheap
make poverty disappear by the simple expedient of not acknowledging it. This is an especially
compelling option if one adopts the stronger version of the proposition that social reality is a human construct.
That view, it will be recalled, holds that social reality is the product of artifice and simulation . Things are as we say they are, a "virtual
solution at that: to
reality" extending well beyond our computer screens to encompass our entire social lives. As poverty theorist Michael Katz (1989: 78) has clearly recognized, poverty is not
so much the existence of poor people as the prevailing discourse about them. It
follows that if the prevailing discourse about poverty ceases ,

if people will just stop worrying and thinking and talking about it, then poverty itself will come to an end . Poor people, of course, will continue to exist.
But they will no longer represent a social problem, just as leprosy ceased to be a social problem although lepers continued to exist. If one chooses to take a less radical stance
and insist that poverty has a reality of its own apart from what people may think about it, the outcome is not fundamentally different. Even if
becoming
indifferent to poverty does not alter its basic reality, it obviously does alter what is done (or, more to the point, not
done) about it. American citizens of Japanese descent really were interned in concentration camps during World War
II but little was done about the outrage until public attention focused on the issue decades later. In the same
way, poverty may be a grim reality, but the loss of a larger meaning for it, and the resulting indifference among an increasing proportion of the
non-poor, is what, more than anything else, enables legislators to end welfare as we have known it .
Replacing the concept of poverty creates conceptual confusion definitional difficulties dont
mean the term isnt useful
Jones 8 Professor @ Stanford Gavin, Professor of English at Stanford University, American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature,
1840-1945, http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8511.html
Knowledge of how the category of poverty has been used and abused historically, returns us to the rationale
behind the poststructuralist decentering of a determinism within class analysis . Yet if our concern lies with the significant
numbers of people who have lived in conditions of relatively painful material deprivation and restricted social resources throughout U.S. history, then it remains essential to
retain a definition of poverty, however complex and contentious it may be, rather than theorizing it into inconsistency and ambivalence. Substantial questions emerge if we see
poverty both from a linguistic-ideological perspective and from a socially referential perspective, as a category that has always suffered from attempts to root its causes in
cultural pathology and moral failure, or from attempts to dismiss it as the register of such oppressive usage. The
term poverty may seem particularly

ripe for deconstruction but we need at least to address the stakes of arguments that implicitly deprive it of
shape altogether, especially if the understanding and redressing of material inequities are pressing concerns .
Despite an engagement of social theory with poststructuralist ideas, the reigning sociological tendency is to treat poverty not as an
unstable construct but as a quantifiable term for complex social forces, an analyzable condition defined by a
network of shifting factors such as income level, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, and access to
educational and health-care facilities.79 Its significance always relative within a context of economic inequality,
poverty has usefully described a dynamic, contextual, and flexible social state that people move into and out of
from many positions.80 It is a term whose definitional difficulties never outweigh the consequences of
abandoning it altogether.
81
Getting our hands dirty in the world of politics is he only way to effectuate meaningful and
lasting change
McClean 1 [David E., The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope, Am. Phil. Conf., www.americanphilosophy.org/archives/
past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm
leftist critics continue to cite

Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson,
and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy
prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national
belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be
relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The
disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These
elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions
about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic
Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue,
and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including
human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like
to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one
of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been

'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neoMarxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a
symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the
problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations "(italics mine).(1) Or as John
Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody
fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit
principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty
prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its
members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view

the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those
successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the
nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that
this is
a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain. Leftist
American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their cynicism
about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination
to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the
later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to
help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American
cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the
We who fancy ourselves

philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public
intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past
high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions
university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism.
such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any
other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community
of nations under a "law of peoples?" The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus
value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of
which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where
intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples'
lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences.
This might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they
are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet
found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."

Development Discourse K - Michigan7 2013

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Descrição original:

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Development Discourse K - Michigan7 2013

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

***DEVELOPMENT KRITIK***

1NC Development Discourse

If, as most intra-modern discussion suggest,

MC perspective moves away from viewing Latin America

to the Left in Latin America suggests that the

America can be fruitfully seen as a crossroads: a regional formation where

industrialists cannot use the labor

what experts overlook, is the models inherent

Since the end of the Cold war, the

current thinking is the assumption that not only

the moral logic linking development and security is an expansive

of security is usually seen by

Copenhagen School of International Relations theory, for example, has

A liberal problematic of security is

liberalism is considered as a technology of government involving a specific design or means of strategizing

This newer form does

idea of 'development' is one way of resolving this apparent paradox. Just as

developmental trusteeship is a liberal framework of government that

liberal opinion has widely

western politicians currently argue that enlightened self-interest interconnects

This understanding of populations as objects to be manipulated to a desired political end leads

With the Final Solution, the state tries to eliminate, through

Do they constitute a conceptual

Each of these notions are in themselves rooted in complex conceptualizations that

These are unprecedented social,

Indigenous peoples and movements have been

the many summits and

--Implications Turns Case - Poverty

Placing it in context, Browne suggests that the Western-inspired

development doctrine can be divided into three phases, the first

these objectives have been in place for decades, it is surprising

--Implications Turns Case - Venezuela

have been important changes at the level of development and the

the government is moving towards an

channels of political participation were created by the

--Alternative Modernity/Coloniality Lens

between alternative modernizations

2008 Constitution is seen as a means to transform the institutional framework

states that the goal of development is

tensions between neodevelopmentalism and post-development.

11-5-12, Arturo Escobar: a post-development thinker to be reckoned with, http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/nov/05/arturo-escobar-post-developmentthinker) gz

Development, which offered much more than an analysis of mainstream development

Escobar's argument was a good deal more

Escobar found ever more

Micropolitical movements succeed in the context of postdevelopment

the geographical constraints of the region, touching everyday practical consciousness

the academic debate on

often do not read what scholars

a perspective calls for greatly restructuring the organisation,

not a state to be arrived at in the future but something

some important elements of the neo-liberal

Resistance to development must be anti-colonial And anti-neoliberal doing the Affirmative

argument is the following: The current socio-economic, political

options, I argue, are taking place in some fashion at the

first is the introduction of more direct forms of democracy.

--AT: Development solves Poverty

On the contrary, the MC program

these questions, I will highlight gender,

--AT: Alternative Fails

--AT: Latin America Wants Development

Burwell reminds her

comments illustrate some of the lessons

--AT: Escobar Bad

DEVELOPMENT KRITIK