SURPLUS POSSIBILITIES: POSTDEVELOPMENT AND COMMUNITY ECONOMIES

In recent years, development practitioners, anthropologists, geographers and others who are observers “on the ground” of the failures of the one-size-fits-all model of development have begun to generate a “postdevelopment” discourse (Rahnema with Bawtree, 1997). By this we mean a set of thinking and doing practices that are guided by a distinctive ethical stance. Postdevelopment discourse is aligned with the long leftist tradition of critical analyses that accompanied the global consolidation, immediately after World War II, of a hegemonic mainstream development project. But while sharing a dissatisfaction with mainstream development, this emerging postdevelopment discourse effects a radical rupture with a style of thinking that underpins much of the critique of development. In this paper we aim to give a taste of how we are broaching the practice of postdevelopment thinking in a linked set of projects: a language project of representing the economy as diverse; a collaboration with a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) that is involved in what we see as postdevelopment interventions in the global trade in labour; and an action research project negotiating postdevelopment pathways in place in a Philippines Municipality. In his landmark book Encountering Development, Arturo Escobar (1995) traces the discursive creation in the immediate postwar period of the “third world” as both the needy object of international development intervention and the excuse for expansion of a new world power’s mode of global governmentality. As Cowan and Shenton (1996) point out in Doctrines of Development, the “development” thinking that informed this consolidation of global “aspiration and effort” dated from the early nineteenth-century concern for the management of surplus populations within the nation-state and colonial outpost. It was at this time, they argue, that the premodern notion of development as a cyclical and organic process of growth and decay whose immanent dynamics were beyond intervention was modernised by its cross-fertilisation with the Enlightenment idea of progress and the dynamics of linear and upward social trajectories (Cowan & Shenton, 1996:8-9). In response to a sense of disillusionment that progress and improvement were somehow not taking their “natural” course, development became linked with the imperative to intervene and with the notion of active trusteeship by the “few who possessed the knowledge to understand why developSURPLUS POSSIBILITIES: POSTDEVELOPMENT AND COMMUNITY ECONOMIES