development as practice in a liberal capitalist world

DEVELOPMENT AS PRACTICE IN ALIBERAL CAPITALIST WORLD

ALAN THOMAS*

Development Policy and Practice, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Abstract: As we enter the 21st century, a dominant trend in development thinking makes

it refer speci®cally to the practice of development agencies. However, to accept this as

the main meaning of development would carry the dangers of losing the complexity and

ambiguity of development, of underplaying the importance of vision and of historical

process, and of limiting development to actions and policies aimed at reducing poverty

in poor countries. It is important to challenge this restricted view of what development

is. At the same time, the current prime importance of practice within the development

®eld should be recognized and development practice should be taken more seriously

from the point of view of theory building. Focused work on notions such as

accountability, trusteeship and public action would help here, as would work on

building up a tradition of critical practice analogous to that in Organization

Development. Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

1 INTRODUCTION

This paper is based around the proposition that, as we enter the 21st century, adominant trend in development thinking restricts it to a rather limited meaning,referring speci®cally to the practice of development agencies. While recognizing thevalue of the work of these agencies in attempting to combat poverty, the paperexplores the dangers of allowing this to become accepted as the main meaning ofdevelopment. However, it also argues that the current prime importance of practicewithin the development ®eld should be recognized and hence that developmentpractice should be taken more seriously from the point of view of theory building.

This brief paper does not attempt to review the considerable literature ondevelopment. It simply raises some issues which I believe are worthy ofconsideration. It draws heavily on certain arguments developed by Cowen andShenton (1996) in their book on Doctrines of Development, which discusses thehistory of the idea of development. Since Mike Cowen's recent death it seems

Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Journal of International DevelopmentJ. Int. Dev. 12, 773±787 (2000)

* Correspondence to: Alan Thomas, Development Policy and Practice, Centre for Complexity and Change,Faculty of Technology, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

particularly important to work through some of the implications of the insightsin his and Shenton's analysis.

The current context for development is liberal capitalism as the dominant mode ofsocial organization and the basis for globalization. Indeed, liberal capitalism is sodominant that there appears tobenoquestionofwholesale social transformation inanyother direction. As a result, development appears no longer to be mainly about thetransformation of the economic and social basis of societies, and is now often thoughtof in terms of dealing with problems rather than searching for grand alternatives.Development has always been an ambiguous idea, on the one hand being virtuallysynonymous with `progress' and on the other referring to intentional e�orts toàmeliorate the disordered faults of progress' (Cowen and Shenton, 1996, p. 7).However, at present there is little debate in development circles about the direction orform of `progress' in the more àdvanced' countries, despite the di�erences betweentypes of capitalismÐUS, European and East Asian. Perhaps there is an unspokenacceptance of Fukuyama's (1992) ènd of history' argument and hence of the idea thatthe only end result of development in the ®rst sense is globalized liberal capitalism, itsregional variations being of relatively little signi®cance. This leaves the danger that thesecond meaning of development will become institutionalized as the prime meaning.

Indeed, at present, what are publicly visible as `development agencies' are mostlyengaged either in attempts to reduce poverty (and improve health, education, genderequality and environmental degradation) or in humanitarian relief to mitigate thee�ects of internal wars and other disasters. Thus the practice of activities such as thesehas become the substance of development in many parts of the world.

The proposition that the dominant sense in which development is used is that ofdevelopment as practice is not one that can be demonstrated conclusively. Thequestion is one of usage and power rather than of trying to show which meaning is the`correct' one. It is impossible to avoid the contradictions behind the idea ofdevelopment by laying down a single, simple de®nition of one's own. As Cowen andShenton point out (1996, p. 4): `Development comes to be de®ned in a multiplicity ofways because there are a multiplicity of ``developers'' who are entrusted with the taskof development.' And only some of this multiplicity have su�cient power for theirinterpretation of `development' to be e�ectively imposed on others.

`Developers' might include governments in poor and middle-income countries,human rights organizations, international people's movements, and many otheragencies. However, the most powerful `developers' of others are the multilateraldevelopment agencies on the one hand and state agencies such as those of the UnitedStates and its allies on the other, and these tend to refer to development in terms ofalleviating problems. This approach is epitomized by the Declaration adopted at theUnited Nations World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995, whichincludes the adoption of the aim of reducing by half by 2015 the proportion of peopleliving in extreme poverty. Similar targets have been agreed during the 1990s, atconferences where these powerful agencies were strongly represented, with respect toreducing infant and maternal mortality rates, achieving universal primary education,access to reproductive health services, minimizing gender inequality and reversingenvironmental degradation. These are now referred to as the InternationalDevelopment Targets. The Copenhagen Declaration also explicitly endorses theglobal market system while recognizing the need to intervene in this system `to thenecessary extent' in order to prevent or correct its failures.

774 A. Thomas

Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Int. Dev. 12, 773±787 (2000)

The rest of this paper is devoted to taking further the proposition that developmentpractice has come to be the dominant meaning of development. First, I discuss howthe end of the Cold War has led to the dominance of the idea of development aspractice and then I explore a little more closely how this is a limited view ofdevelopment. I go on to how the axes of debate on development are quite di�erentnow compared to previous debates, relating them to the various competing views ofdevelopment. Then in the last two sections I look at two major implications of theproposition which lead in di�erent directions. There is the need to react to the dangerthat the dominance of the idea of development as practice may lead to this becomingaccepted as e�ectively the only meaning of development. This makes it imperative tocontest this meaning by promoting the other senses of the term. The other implicationis quite di�erent. Recognizing the importance of the idea of development as practiceimplies building on it by researching it, theorizing about it, and so on. This points tothe importance of work on aspects of agency in the study of development, includingparticularly questions of trusteeship and of accountability.

2 DEVELOPMENT SINCE THE COLD WAR

TheColdWarhas receded into history remarkably quickly. It has become clear that ourprevious concentration on development as a postWorldWar Two phenomenon takingplace in the `Third World' was a limited view shaped by Cold War thinking. There areseveral ways in which development couldmean something di�erent as we enter the 21stcentury from what it meant for most of the second half of the twentieth, though thispaper suggests its meaning has become limited once again, in another way.

First, development can no longer be seen in terms of competing capitalist andcommunist (or state socialist) models, since `capitalism has won'. Second, the notionthat development refers speci®cally to part of the world, the `underdeveloped' or`Third' world where the competition between the two models takes place, as well asthe possibility of searching for a third alternative, makes no sense now that the`SecondWorld' has mostly collapsed. One might like to suggest that development, if itcontinues to have meaning as we enter the 21st century, should apply to processeswhich occur, or fail to occur, at all levels anywhere in the world, from the individualup to the global. Indeed, massive economic and social transformations are occurringcurrently in much of the world, particularly China and the rest of East and SoutheastAsia and to some extent India. Nevertheless, the dominant usage of developmentrefers to the practice of development agencies intervening in global capitalism toalleviate poverty and other problems, so that development is still applied mainly tocertain, other, parts of the world, namely those de®ned as `poor'. Thus the BritishDepartment for International Development, for example, uses the notion of povertyfocus in such a way that there is a danger of development appearing to apply only tocertain of the world's poorest countriesÐand not to those parts of the worldexperiencing the most far-reaching transformation.

Third, the demise of the state socialist model of development makes it even moreessential for development to be analysed in relation to capitalism. Possibilities fordevelopment now have to be related to the current realities of global capitalism, andindeed the combination of capitalist industrialization with liberal democracy is widely

Development as Practice 775


accepted as the only viable model of social organization. Fukuyama (1995), for

example, writes:

Today virtually all advanced countries have adopted, or are trying to adopt,

liberal democratic political institutions, and a great number have simultaneously

moved in the direction of market-oriented economics and integration into the

global capitalist division of labour.. . . As modern technology unfolds, it shapes modern economies in a coherent

fashion, interlocking them in a vast global economy. The increasing complexity

and information intensity of modern life at the same time renders centralized

economic planning extremely di�cult. The enormous prosperity created by

technology-driven capitalism, in turn, serves as an incubator for a liberal regime

of universal and equal rights, in which the struggle for recognition of human

dignity culminates. . . . [T]he world's advanced countries have no alternative

model of political and economic organization other than democratic capitalism

to which they can aspire (Fukuyama, 1995, pp. 3±4).

As a corollary to viewing development today in relation to the dominance of global

liberal capitalism, the history of development should be viewed over the whole period

of the domination of the industrial capitalist system, rather than only in relation to the

polarized post-war world political order of the Cold War. According to Cowen and

Shenton (1996), the era of industrial capitalism has also been the period of the

`modern doctrine of development'. They suggest that the latter was invented in the

®rst half of the nineteenth century precisely to control the social disruptions caused

by the unchecked `development' of capitalism.

Here we run up the ambiguity of the term `development'. Capitalism had been

`developing' for several centuries up to this point, continues to `develop' to this day, and

can be expected to `develop' into the future. Indeed, an absolutely crucial aspect of

capitalism is that it is intrinsically dynamic; it tends to build on itself and grow or

`develop' from within. This ìmmanent' development should be clearly di�erentiated

from the ìntentional development' which forms the deliberate policy and actions of

states and development agencies, and which I am arguing is currently the dominant

meaning given to the term. Cowen and Shenton also argue that development should be

conceptually di�erentiated from progress. They point out that in the preceding

centuries progress had been thought of as an immanent process, in that human society

was conceived as moving inexorably to a higher and higher stage of civilization. There

had always been casualties of this `progress', as with those agricultural producers

dispossessed by the ènclosures' of the early seventeenth century in Britain. Only when

this `progress' moved to the stage of industrial capitalism did the poverty,

unemployment and human misery caused threaten to bring about social disorder on

a scale which necessitated ìntentional constructive activity' (Cowen and Shenton,

1996). This was when intentional development was invented.

Industrial production and organization was accepted . . . to be a historically

given part of the movement towards an organic, positive or natural stage of

society in Europe. The burden of development was to compensate for the

negative propensities of capitalism through the reconstruction of social order. To

776 A. Thomas


develop, then, was to ameliorate the social misery which arose out of theimmanent process of capitalist growth (Cowen and Shenton, 1996, p. 116).

Writers of the post-development school are clearly referring to intentionaldevelopment or development as practice when they suggest that the èra ofdevelopment' began with Harry S. Truman's inaugural address as President of theUnited States in January 1949 (Esteva, 1992), and that development `did not work' sothat now ìt is time to dismantle this mental structure' (W. Sachs, 1992, p. 1). Esteva isclear that the concept of development was not new, having been used and debated inmany ways for at least 150 years. It was Truman's promotion of a `program ofdevelopment' as a way of maintaining United States hegemony which he suggestsushered in a new era, one in which the idea of development became of centralimportance at a global level.

In fact, to Truman development was only part of a strategy for the containment ofcommunism. The era which began with Truman's inauguration would be betterdescribed as the era of the Cold War than the èra of development'. For the next fortyyears development was the subject of competing theories in the context of the globalclash between capitalism and communism. The post-development writers have doneus a service in drawing attention to development as `practice' or `programme', butthey are inaccurate in suggesting this usage of the term to be characteristic of the ColdWar era. It is better to follow Cowen and Shenton in considering intentionaldevelopment as having formed part of the policies of powerful global actors ever sincethe ®rst half of the nineteenth century. In fact I suggest that it is particularly since theend of the Cold War that this sense of development has become the dominant one.

3 PRACTICE AS A LIMITED VIEW OF DEVELOPMENT

By arguing that the dominant meaning of development has come to reside in the ideaof development as practice, I am suggesting that development has taken on a meaningwhich is limited in several ways.

First, it focuses on only one of the three main senses of the term `development'which are distinguished in my discussion of Meanings and Views of Development(Thomas, 2000). These are:

(i) as a vision, description or measure of the state of being of a desirable society;(ii) as an historical process of social change in which societies are transformed over

long periods;(iii) as consisting of deliberate e�orts aimed at improvement on the part of various

agencies, including governments, all kinds of organizations and social move-ments.

It appears that as we enter the 21st century the third sense of the term has becomedominant. Thus development has come to have a rather tautological meaning,referring not to a desired state or the process of social change which might achieve it,but simply to whatever is done in the name of development, and development is nowused to mean practice more than vision or process.

Second, while the dominant notion of development as practice cannot excludeideas of development as vision and as process completely, it is limited in that itincorporates rather simplistic versions of these. When development means simply



what development agencies do then the vision of development tends to be reduced totargets and the process of development to techniques. The targets may be extremelyambitious, as with the Copenhagen Declaration target mentioned above for halvingthe proportion of the world's population in extreme poverty by 2015, and thetechniques may be relatively sophisticated, as with the plethora of good practiceguidelines on the running of micro-®nance programmes or the widespread use oflogical framework planning. It may also be argued that there is still room forconsiderable debate about the underlying assumptions on which the agencies basetheir calculations that certain policies will lead to desired results, and that theseassumptions in turn must be based on some broad theory of social change.Nevertheless, targets are inherently unidimensional and as such represent a verylimited vision of social transformation, while the application of techniques designedto achieve such targets tends to simplify theory to the idea that large-scale socialchange may be achieved straightforwardly by deliberate actions, or even that povertyreduction may be achieved by targeting the poor without the need for broader socialchange, and thus provides an equally limited view of the historical process ofdevelopment.

Thirdly, considering development as practice tends to limit consideration to casesof the deliberate application of policies aimed at poverty reduction by leadinginternational development agencies. However, it is important to learn from theexamples of China and other East Asian and Southeast Asian countries which arecertainly developing, but not simply in response to the practice of internationaldevelopment agencies. Of course, these countries generally have strong states whichshould be regarded as development agencies in their own right, so that these couldalso be thought of as examples of development as practice. Nevertheless there remainsthe danger that focusing on the poverty reduction policies of international agencieswill restrict attention to the poorest countries, since this is where these policies arefocused, even though countries which remain poor are by de®nition not likely toprovide lessons about the successful application of development policies.

Generally, the notion of development as practice fails to capture the complexityand ambiguity of development. Even the apparently simple de®nition given byChambers (1997), for whom development means just `good change', alreadyembodies a degree of ambiguity. The two words combine quite di�erent ideasderiving from di�erent senses in which the term `development' is used. `Good' impliesa vision of a desirable society, something to aim at, a state of being with certainpositive attributes which can be measured so that we can talk of `more' or `less'development. `Change', on the other hand, is a process, which may entail disruptionof established patterns of living.

There are several further points about the idea of development which go beyondsimply `good change' and which together show it to be an inherently ambiguousconcept. First of all, development implies an all-encompassing change, not just animprovement in one aspect. Second, development is not just a question of a once-o�process of change to something better, but implies a process which builds on itself,where change is continuous and where improvements build on previous improve-ments. Third, development is a matter of changes occurring at the level of socialchange and at the level of the individual human being at one and the same time.Changes in society have implications for the people who live in that society, andconversely changes in how people think, interact, make their livings and perceive

778 A. Thomas


themselves form the basis for changes in society. Finally, development is not alwaysseen positively. These points often go together, in that what some see as a generalimprovement may have losers as well as winners, and if social change is all-encompassing and continuous then the implication is that previous ways of life maybe swept away, with the loss of positive as well as negative features.

However, the dominant usage of development tends to deny this complexity andambiguity. For example, reducing development to a question of targets and ofdeliberate policies aimed at alleviating problems directly leaves aside questions aboutwhether such change can indeed be achieved without what Schumpeter called`creative destruction'. Again, since development agencies are often involved inemergency relief, this also comes to form part of what development is taken to mean,even though here there is nothing of the àll-encompassing change, not just animprovement in one aspect', or `process which builds on itself, where change iscontinuous and where improvements build on previous improvements'. We candeclare that development shouldmean these things, but if we lack the power to imposesuch views development in practice means what development agencies do, and this ismuch more restricted.

4 NEWAXES OF DEBATE ON DEVELOPMENT

The suggestion that development in its dominant meaning is now somewhat restrictedand refers mainly to practice does not mean that debates and disagreements aboutdevelopment have ceased. However, the main axes of debate have shifted fromopposition between major theoretical positions or models of social transformation todi�erences about the form and extent of intervention or which agencies have the rightto intervene.

Although the clash between capitalism and communism now seems to have beenresolved in favour of capitalism, there remain basic di�erences in how development isseen to relate to capitalism. Competing views of development may be characterized asdevelopment of, alongside or against capitalism. Table 1 ( from Thomas, 2000)summarizes these in terms of their visions, theories of social change, and views on therole and agents of development.

At one extreme there is neo-liberalism (or market liberalism), for which theimmanent development of capitalism is su�cient. A number of essentially di�erentviews, concerned with underlying social and economic structures and which seedevelopment as involving changes in these structures, are grouped under the headingstructuralism. These views tend to be associated with advocating state planning andare generally out of favour as far as development practice is concerned. Then there isìnterventionism', which sees the need for intentional development alongsidecapitalism. There are others who reject both capitalism and state planning andlook for alternatives in di�erent models of development, in particular what isvariously termed ànother development' or `people-centred development'. Finallythere is the post-development school, which rejects the whole notion of development.

It would be useful, and neat, to be able to write that each of the columns in Table 1constitutes a coherent theory of development. However, in practice things are lessclear-cut than that. First, the dividing-lines between the columns only represent oneperson's attempt to simplify and to bring out the most important di�erences between



Table

1.Summary

ofthemain

viewsofdevelopment(Thomas,2000,p.43)

Developmentof

capitalism

Developmentalongsidecapitalism

Developmentagainstcapitalism

Rejectionof

development

Neo-liberalism

Interventionism

Structuralism

`Alternative'

(people-centred)

development

`Post-

development'

`Market

e�ciency'

`Governingthe

market'

Vision:desirable

`developed'state

Liberalcapitalism

(modernindustrialsocietyandliberal

dem

ocracy)

Modernindustrialsociety

(butnotcapitalist)

Allpeople

andgroups

realise

theirpotential

[`development'

isnotdesirable]

(plusachievingbasicsocial/environ-

mentalgoals)

Theory

ofsocial

change

Internal

dynamic

of

capitalism

Needto

remove

`barriers'to

modernization

Changecanbe

deliberately

directed

Struggle

betweenclasses

(andother

interests)

[notclear]

[notclear]

Role

of

`development'

Immanent

process

within

capitalism

To`ameliorate

thedisordered

faultsof

[capitalist]progress'

Comprehensiveplanning/

transform

ationofsociety

Process

ofindividual

andgroup

empowerment

A`hoax'which

strengthened

UShegem

ony

Agents

of

development

Individual

entrepreneurs

Developmentagencies

or`trustees'of

development(states,NGOs,international

organizations)

Collectiveaction

(generallythroughthe

state)

Individuals,social

movem

ents

Development

agencies

780 A. Thomas


views. In fact some of the views identi®ed overlap, labels are not agreed and some ofthe protagonists might distinguish their views from others in quite di�erent ways.Second, not all the views represented in Table 1 are complete theories of development.For example, the àlternative development' school is strong on vision but weak on anytheory of social change which might help explain how this vision might be achieved.Conversely, certain structuralist views concentrate on explaining social change but failto o�er any clear prescriptions.

However, the columns of Table 1 can be used to see how the main debates aboutdevelopment have shifted. As is well-known, neo-liberalism was dominant in the1980s, and could be seen as a reaction against the structuralist views which hadachieved widespread credence in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus a major debate indevelopment thinking was between these two views, which nevertheless sharedimportant areas of commonality. Both saw development mainly in terms of broadhistorical social change, and did not o�er detailed prescriptions for what developmentagencies should do. The main area of disagreement was between the neo-liberalinsistence on the materialist motivations of individuals and the self-regulating marketand the structuralist view of the importance of social solidarity, class and collectiveforms of action. Since the only examples of large-scale collective action fordevelopment have occurred through the state, this opposition tended to berepresented as market versus state or pro®t versus planning.

In the 1990s, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the general discrediting ofcomprehensive state planning as a vehicle for development, structuralist thinking felleven further out of favour, particularly with development agencies in respect of theirpolicies towards the poorest countries. However, the ideal of a totally free globalmarket society as envisaged by crude versions of neo-liberalism is also demonstrablybankrupt (Hobsbawm, 1994). The evident chaos caused by the attempt to letcapitalism `develop' itself in the ex-Soviet Union, together with the increases ininequity, poverty, environmental degradation and wars has led the World Bank andother agencies to modify their position considerably from the neo-liberal `Washingtonconsensus' of the 1980s.

Hence those with a degree of power in various development agencies today are allinterventionists of some description. This is true equally for those who welcomeFukuyama's position on the lack of any realistic alternative to liberal capitalismexpressed in the quote above and for those who deplore it but feel obliged to accept itnevertheless. The consensus among the world's decision-makers and academicsregards global industrial capitalism as a fact of 21st century life, while at the sametime perceiving a need for non-market interventionÐor ìntentional development' toàmeliorate' its `disordered faults'. This includes intervention by the state and actionsby other development agencies, including the World Bank itself, which go wellbeyond simply ensuring the conditions for market competition. The main area ofdebate in what may be called `mainstream' development circles is no longer `marketversus state' but about the form and degree of intervention.

There are debates about whether intervention should be minimal or far-reaching,and about the role of intervention with respect to capitalism. On the one hand thereare those for whom poverty, pollution, violence and so on are only problems insofaras they threaten the proper working of the capitalist system. However, they recognizethat the answer is not simply to try to remove all obstacles to the self-regulation of themarket, but that these problems need dealing with at least to the extent that they are



kept under control. On the other hand, others see capitalism as dynamic andproductive but dangerous if it is not controlled. From this point of view social goalsneed to be addressed directly and the market must be stringently regulated in orderfor development goals to be achieved. Kaplinsky (1998) has referred to the former asthe market e�ciency view of intervention, and the latter as governing the market.

All the versions of interventionism envision the state and other developmentagencies as taking on the job of intentional development required. As noted, theseform the current `mainstream' of development. The set of ideas grouped togetherunder the labels `another development' or `people-centred development' are areaction against this. In particular they reject the notion that others should determinewhat is required for people's development. This is a current of thought that placesemphasis on people themselves as agents of development, solving their own problemsindividually or through local organizations and networks.

It has to be admitted that there is little if any theory as to how such dreams could bereplicated on a large scale, and how the kind of social change could be brought aboutthat would safeguard them for the future. However, throughout the 1990s there hasbeen a growing consensus on the need to look more closely at the potential for localgroups and individuals to be involved as their own development agents, if onlybecause of the manifest failure of the main theoretical perspectives on development todeliver major improvements in living conditions to the world's poorest individualsand communities.

From the point of view of this paper, it should be noted that both sides of thedebate between `mainstream' interventionism and people-centred developmentconcentrate on development as practice. The debate is about whether developmentshould be done on behalf of others or whether people should somehow be empoweredto `develop themselves'.

5 CONTESTING THE DOMINANT VIEW OF DEVELOPMENT ASPRACTICE

It is important to accept that the dominant meaning of development is indeedrestricted to practice or intervention in the context of liberal capitalism. Only then canwe move on, either to contest that meaning or to work through the implications.

However, if the dominant meaning attributed to development derives from theusage of powerful agencies, how can those with less power contest this meaning?Fortunately, it is not clear that power over usage is monolithic. There have certainlybeen moments when powerful agencies have been in¯uenced to adopt conceptsoriginating in civil society or with apparently less powerful agencies. For example, thenotions of sustainable development, of gender in development, of participatorydevelopment, have all gained widespread credence beyond the groups or movementswhere they originated. The fact that development currently means the practice ofdevelopment is certainly open to challenge, for example by new development theoristsor by those propounding new visions for development, though this challenge does notappear to be strong at the moment.

Contesting the idea of development as practice means emphasizing development asvision or historical process or both. One potential source of challenge in terms ofvision is `people-centred' development, including, for example, Korten's vision of

782 A. Thomas


àuthentic' development based on principles of justice, sustainability and

inclusiveness (Korten, 1995), and the idea that development means not just

combating or ameliorating poverty but restoring or enhancing basic human

capabilities and freedoms. As noted above, this vision is also about practice: people

should be enabled (or èmpowered') to take direct action to meet their own needs.

However, this vision of empowerment involves more than practice, since it implies

redistributing power and transforming institutions (Friedmann, 1996). It leads in the

potentially extremely fruitful direction of considering development in terms of

è�ective appropriation of human rights by all' (I. Sachs, 2000, p. 95). A ®nal

important aspect of this alternative development vision is cultural diversity. If people

and communities are empowered to develop themselves and demand their rights, it

follows that they will do so in distinctively di�erent ways.

When we move from vision to considering historical process, we ®nd that there is

no clear model for how `people-centred' development, based on the realization of

human potential in diverse ways, might build on itself to create a self-reproducing

process of social change throughout a whole society over a long period. We need to

look elsewhere for a theoretical challenge to the notion that liberal capitalism and

global market society constitute the only future for humanity and hence for a

challenge to development only as intervention within this context. One important

source of challenging ideas in this area is the work of Karl Polanyi (1944/1957), who

disputed the idea that the development of capitalism accords to some kind of natural

historical law, arguing that the conditions for global capitalism have constantly to be

promoted by those political forces which favour them. He characterized the historical

processes by which global capitalism has been established as a struggle between two

`movements': one trying to achieve the commoditization of land, labour and

economic organization by force; the other attempting to `protect' these three

elements. It was not a question of the natural workings of the market itself against

government, but two competing movements, representing capitalist interests and

those adversely a�ected by capitalism respectively, struggling for in¯uence within

government.

It is instructive to attempt to interpret some recent history of development in

similar terms. For example, trade unions have long been engaged in trying to protect

the collective interests of workers and up to the 1960s and 1970s were increasingly

successful in doing so. Up to that time also, in less developed countries there were a

large number of state interventions regulating the relation between the national

economy and the international. LDCs typically maintained exchange rate and credit

controls, tari�s, and import controls. States commonly imposed direct price controls

and quality standards; they also employ di�erent types of incentives such as

preferential tax treatment for reinvestment in certain areas of production. Not only in

LDCs but in advanced capitalist countries as well, many public goods and especially

public services were, and are, supplied directly by state agencies. Also, almost all

countries have at least some services provided universally, as with the National Health

Service and basic educational provision in the UK, and the basic food provisioning

policies of the Sri Lankan governments since independence. These can all be seen as

the result of interests outside and within governments succeeding in restricting the

force and scope of capitalism.



On the other hand, since the early 1980s pro-market interests have made headway.Particularly during the 1980s, many Southern states competed to attract investmentfrom transnational corporations by making a virtue of their tough anti-unionlegislation. Structural adjustment programmes, promoted by the World Bank and theInternational Monetary Fund (IMF), have e�ectively forced many LDCs to becomealmost completely open to overseas ownership of enterprises through foreigninvestment. Under the so-called `Washington consensus' both these multilateralagencies and others such as the United States Agency for International Development(USAID) agreed on a range of policies such as minimizing state intervention in theeconomy, privatization of any previously state-owned industries, and a reduction instate provision of services. These policies were not only followed at home but pushedon to LDCs. Rather than being an inevitable consequence of global market forces,they can be seen as the result of a political movement advancing the conditions forcapitalism to `develop' further at the global level.

Polanyi saw the two movements as operating within the context of states, such asthe British state, although the system of industrial capitalism which they were tryingto promote or restrain was attaining global in¯uence. As we enter the 21st century wecan interpret events in terms of two similar movements at global level, struggling overthe commodi®cation not only of land and labour but also of knowledge and even lifeitself, epitomized by the clash between various NGOs and `people's organizations'and corporate interests at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle inNovember 1999.

6 THE IMPLICATIONS OF ACCEPTING THAT DEVELOPMENT HASCOME TO MEAN PRACTICE

At the same time as challenging the tendency for development only to mean practice,it is important to take development as practice very seriously, and to work out someof the implications. If development is simply what development agencies do, then wemay ask what are development agencies and what entitles them to the name. Cowenand Shenton suggest that there is a basic `problem of development' which arisesbecause development as a process of improvement which builds on itself also causesdestruction, and those adversely a�ected are generally powerless to help themselves.As a response to this problem, at the same time as the invention of `intentionaldevelopment' the concept of `trusteeship' was also brought into use. Trusteeshipmeans that one agency is `entrusted' with acting on behalf of another, in this case totry to ensure the `development' of the other. Cowen and Shenton de®ne it as `theintent which is expressed, by one source of agency, to develop the capacities ofanother. It is what binds the process of development to the intent of development'(1996, p. x). Trusteeship may be taken on by an agency on another's behalf without`the other' asking to `be developed' or even being aware that the intention to `develop'them is there.

Originally trusteeship was generally exercized by states on behalf of their societiesor by colonial states on behalf of the colonized. Since attaining independence manyex-colonial states continued to assume trusteeship over the development of theirpeoples, and until the 1970s the idea of the state as the sole legitimate agency ofdevelopment retained strong currency. More recently a variety of agencies can be seen

784 A. Thomas


as claiming trusteeship over the development of others, or even over the developmentof global society as a whole, including a variety of local, national and internationalNGOs as well as international organizations such as theWorld Bank, IMF and othersincluding the United Nations and its agencies. One might even see the range ofagencies involved including large private corporations, to the extent that their powerover populations and communities often rivals that of states and internationalagencies, and their interests also are served by promoting development in order toforestall widespread social disruption. This puts corporate responsibility alongsiderights on the agenda for development debate in the new century, as indeed it alreadyhas been by various agencies including Britain's Department for InternationalDevelopment.

Two questions have to be asked about any agency which claims trusteeship for thedevelopment of others. Does it have legitimacy to act on their behalf? And does ithave the power and capacity to do so? For almost the whole of the period since theìnvention' of intentional development, the state has claimed both the right and themight to develop its people. However, the idea of the `developmental state' now onlyclearly applies to a small number of cases (Leftwich, 1994), and even there it can nolonger be regarded as the sole source of development action. Nevertheless,particularly in East and South East Asia and to some extent in Latin America,there are relatively strong states which maintain trusteeship over the development oftheir populations, and even the weaker states of Africa cannot be discounted aslegitimate development agencies. In addition, community and local organizations arehere to stay alongside national governments and international organizations as agentsof national development. Thus there is a plethora of agencies claiming trusteeship insome form, but no clear successor to the developmental state. The same is the casewhen one starts to think in terms of world development rather than developmentwithin the boundaries of nation states. Hence the question of the inter-organizationalrelations between the agencies (Robinson et al., 2000) takes on a huge importance,and in particular the rather poorly conceptualized notion of partnership. It is easier tosee development globally as the joint responsibility of a number of agencies eachhaving a part to play in global governance, and thus working together as partners inintentional development, than to envisage a single global state taking on the role oftrusteeship for world development.

A third question about trusteeship asks which interests are represented by adevelopment agency. Can the interests of those being developed be representedthrough the actions of an agency èntrusted' with acting on their behalf? The verynotion of trusteeship depends on being able to answer `Yes' to this question.However, there are those, particularly those seeking àlternative development' whosee this answer as impossible. Banuri, for example writes that if development means`what ``we'' can do for ``them''' then it is just a `licence' for imperial intervention(Banuri, 1990, p. 96). For these the answer is to reject the notion of trusteeship. Peopleshould become the agents of their own development.

The idea of people becoming their own development agents raises enormousquestions about political feasibility as well as the question whether it is really possibleto avoid the notion of trusteeship in this way. Surely empowerment cannot beachieved without being promoted by some powerful agent allied with those to beempowered? Perhaps some form of people's movement might ®ll the role of thisagent, but even then the leadership of that movement would be taking on a



trusteeship role in a way. A more general problem is how those with the role of trusteeor development agent can be made to continue to align their interests at least to someextent with the interests of those `being developed'. This is a question about how todesign accountability into sustainable institutional systems.

Finally, taking development as practice seriously implies researching andtheorizing about `intentional development', including questions about action andproblems of trusteeship. Research might include empirical investigation of the e�ectsof interventions designed to have certain developmental e�ects, as well as theorganizational rationales which led the agencies concerned to undertake theinterventions. It would have to take into account strong states in poor countries aswell as community, local and international agencies as sources of intervention. Inmost cases it is unlikely that in actuality the desired results will follow linearly fromthe policies and practices designed to bring them about. Analysing the role of suchintentional development and of other social forces in the changes which actuallyoccur could be done in terms of Polanyi's con¯icting movements.

New theory could include work on what is involved in action for development atthe global level, and on the ambiguity of the `developer' or `trustee' role. The formercould involve analysing the implications of extending the notion of `public action'(DreÁ ze and Sen, 1989; Mackintosh, 1992), with its two aspects of meeting public needand simultaneously contesting what is to be regarded as such a need, to globaldevelopment.

The latter could lead to a strand of development studies analogous to work inOrganization Development (OD), where the role of change agent is subject to criticalanalysis, those involved in such roles practice self-awareness and a critical theory ofaction research has been built up. The ®eld of development in the broader sense usedthroughout this paper needs to build up its own tradition of critical practice in asimilar way.

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