Post-development: From the Critique of Development to a Pluriverse of Alternatives

Abstract

This chapter lays out both the critique of the oxymoron sustainable development as well as the potential and nuances of a post-development agenda. Post-development is generally meant as an era or approach in which development would no longer be the central organizing principle of social life.

We highlight the contribution by Joan Martinez Alier with an ecological critique to development and his work on the global movement for environmental justice to show that activists should be considered as theory and knowledge producers in their own right. We then propose to deepen and widen a research, dialogue and action agenda for activists, policy makers and scholars on a variety of worldviews and practices relating to our collective search for an ecologically wise and socially just world. This could be one base in the search for alternatives to United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in an attempt to truly ‘transforming the world’. In fact, it is an agenda towards the pluriverse: ‘a world where many worlds fit’, as the Zapatista say.

1 The Conceptualization of (Post-)Development in the Social Sciences, and the Contribution by Joan Martinez Alier

It is impossible to provide a single definition of development. For many, development is the ineluctable strategy by which poor countries need to modernize; for others, it is an imperial imposition by rich capitalist countries on poor ones, and as such, it should be opposed; for yet others, it is a discourse invented by the West for the cultural domination of non-Western societies that need to be denounced as such, beyond its economic effects; finally, for many common people the world over, development has become either a reflection of their aspirations to a dignified life, or an utterly destructive process with which they have to coexist, and not infrequently both at the same time. Taken as a whole, it can be said that development is a complex historical process with social, economic, political and cultural aspects.

Over the past six decades, the conceptualization of development in the social sciences has seen three main moments, corresponding to three contrasting theoretical orientations: modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s, with its allied theories of growth; Marxist-inspired dependency theory and related perspectives in the 1960s and 1970s; and critiques of development as a cultural discourse in the 1990s and 2000s. Here we argue that we might have entered into a fourth moment: marked by a focus on a pluriverse of alternatives to development.

The year 2022 marks the thirtieth anniversary of The Development Dictionary, edited by Wolfgang (Sachs, 1992). While the Dictionary might have fallen short of its intention to write the obituary of development, it did send shockwaves through the activist, policy and scholarly worlds and became an influential text. The relevance and impact of Sachs’ book are still felt today. At the same time, there is no dearth of revitalized hegemonic notions, of which ‘sustainable development’ might be best known, an ‘amoeba concept’ still floating thanks to its malleability,¹ and indeed given new life in 2015 by the global intergovernmental agreement on Sustainable Development Goals. In this context, we published the book Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary (Kothari et al., 2020), which while emulating the spirit of the original Dictionary brings both reincarnated worldviews and fresh alternatives to ‘development‘sharply into view. The starting point is the need to go beyond critique and concentrate on articulating the narratives of those struggling to retain or create diverse ways of life against the homogenising forces of development. There is a need for radical post-development practices, ideas and worldviews to provide an agenda for activists, policy makers and scholars to help in ‘transforming our world’. What is needed is an alternative to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2013, 2015).

The concept of ‘post-development‘emerges from the confluence of four main books: first, The Development Dictionary, edited by Wolfgang Sachs; second, Encountering Development by Arturo Escobar; third, The History of Development by Gilbert Rist; fourth, The Post-Development Reader, edited by Rahnema and Bawtree (Sachs, 1992; Escobar, 1995; Rist, 2003; Rahnema & Bawtree, 1997). Feminist contributions include Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development and The Subsistence Perspective, authored by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies. Two decades later, our book Pluriverse: The Post-Development Dictionary focuses more upon alternatives to, rather than the critique of, development.

In addition to these, the work of activist-scholars such as Gilbert Rist, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Serge Latouche, Majid Rahnema, Wolfgang Sachs, Ashish Nandy, Shiv Visvanathan, Gustavo Esteva (Sachs, 1992), Rajni Kothari, Manfred Max-Neef, François Partant, Bernard Charbonneau and Ivan Illich have gone a long way in drawing the contours of a post-development future. Joan Martinez Alier himself was contributing since the 1980s with an ecological critique of development (Martinez-Alier, 1987), and more recently, wrote a chapter for Pluriverse where he shows how a global movement for environmental justice is helping to push society and economy towards environmental sustainability (Martinez-Alier, 2002). By taking seriously the rich knowledge of social movement activists on issues such as environmental justice, resistance to development and alternative forms of valuation, among others, he brought to the fore the fact that activists and even grassroots communities should be considered as theory and knowledge producers in their own right. This is a central insight of post-development theory; it explains why movement-inspired notions such as Buen Vivir have become so central to the entire post-development movement. Martinez-Alier’s notion of ecological distribution conflicts paved the way for a whole wave of research centered on the relation between environmental destruction and development, thus strengthening calls for post-development. Indeed, a great deal of the web-based project – Environmental Justice Atlas (ejatlas.org) can be seen as a technology for mapping such a relation and as such as contribution to making visible paths towards post-development.

The tendency to attribute all ideas to male scholars dies hard, but in fact, women across the globe pioneered these post-development ideas autonomously from the start. Joan Martinez Alier realized the importance of the feminist contribution early on. Since the 1980s, his work has occasionally overlapped, though usually run parallel with ecofeminists such as Vandana Shiva, who questioned the green revolution in 1988, and Maria Mies, who promoted the subsistence model, in 1999. As Ariel Salleh emphasises, the left ecofeminist position has always offered both a critique of ‘development‘and advocated post-development alternative livelihoods.

The term post-development can be used to refer either to an era or an approach in which development is no longer the central organizing principle of social life. Even as critiques of development increase in academic spaces, they are equally powerfully arising amongst indigenous peoples, other local communities, womens’ rights movements, and other civil society groupings; most prominently amongst the victims of development. Across the world, ancient worldviews resurface alongside new frameworks and visions presenting systemic alternatives for human and planetary well-being. This is forcing the decolonization of knowledge systems and epistemologies, breaking down many of the dualisms that western patriarchal paradigms have engendered between humans and nature.

The idea of post-development is related to at least five other emerging imaginaries:

• Post-capitalism – questioning capitalism’s capacity to fully occupy the economy.

• Post- or de-growth – decentring growth from the definition of both economy and social life.

• Post-patriarchy – challenging the primacy of masculinist approaches to political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property.

• Anti-racism – fighting the systemic racism and the oppression of marginalized groups.

• De-coloniality – untangling the production of knowledge from a primarily Eurocentric episteme.

The current mood is ‘to search for alternatives in a deeper sense, that is, aiming to break away from the cultural and ideological bases of development, bringing forth other imaginaries, goals, and practices’ (Gudynas & Acosta, 2011:75).

The time is ripe to deepen and widen a research, dialogue and action agenda on a variety of worldviews and practices relating to the collective search for an ecologically wise and socially just world. These should be transformative alternatives to the currently dominant processes of globalized development, including its structural roots in modernity,² capitalism, state domination, patriarchy, colonialism, racism and more specific phenomena, like casteism, found in some parts of the world. Alternatives should go beyond the false solutions that those in power are proposing in an attempt to ‘greenwash’ development, including variants of ‘sustainable development’, market remedies and technofixes. The post-development agenda should investigate the what, how, who and why of all that is transformative and what is not. Equally, though, proponents of post-development need to go beyond a number of weaknesses in their narrative, by acknowledging that development as an idea has not been buried and by sharpening their focus on the structural changes needed to deal with issues of inequity, injustice, deprivation and ecological collapse (Ziai, 2015).

The exploration of alternatives to development already finds concrete expression in a panoply of new or re-emerging concepts and practices such as buen vivir, degrowth, ecological swaraj, radical feminisms of various kinds, ubuntu, commoning, solidarity economy, environmental and climate justice, food and energy sovereignty. These are perhaps the most visible examples of an emergent post-developmentalist epistemic-political field towards a pluriverse.³ These radical alternatives are becoming not only more visible but, increasingly, genuinely credible and viable. And yet they are still marginal in comparison to the dominant narrative and practice of development. Thus, it is a good moment to make such alternatives more widely known and to facilitate bridges amongst them while respecting their geopolitical and epistemic specificities. It is also critical to build bridges between constructive alternatives and peoples’ movements resisting the dominant economic and political systems (Kothari , 2015; Kaul et al. 2022).

The chapter is structured as follows. First, we present a critique of development in its recent reincarnations, like ‘sustainable development’ (SD), outlining the road from Stockholm 1972 to the Sustainable Development Goals, that is to say, the road from the critique to the defence of economic growth. Second, we introduce the origins and importance of transformative alternative worldviews and practices to development. Third, we outline the purpose and conceptualization of Pluriverse: The Post-Development Dictionary, with a set of questions at the core of the agenda for transformation that we are proposing.

2 A Critique of Sustainable Development and Its False Solutions

Everything must change in order to remain the same. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1963)

In 1987, the UN World Commission on Development and the Environment presented the report Our Common Future, better known as the Brundtland report, coining the concept of ‘sustainable development‘, then launching it at the Rio Summit on Environment and Development in 1992 – Principle 12 of the Declaration. Within such a framing, the push towards growth and economic liberalization was taken further at subsequent global events relating to sustainable development, though partially concealed behind the rhetoric of environmental sustainability. Compared to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Stockholm 1972, the later conferences involved reframing both the diagnosis and prognosis in relation to the ecological crisis. The focus supposedly became poverty in developing countries, instead of affluence in developed countries, along the lines of the post-materialist thesis of Inglehart. This idea that ‘you first need to be rich, in order to be an environmentalist’ has been critiqued by Martinez-Alier with his famous concept of environmentalism of the poor (Inglehart, 1990). Economic growth was freed of stigma and redefined as a necessary step towards the solution of environmental problems. (Gómez-Baggethun & Naredo, 2015) This watering down of the initial debates of the 1970s influenced by the Limits to Growth report (Meadows et al., 1972) constitutes the core of the ‘green economy’, a kind of Green Keynesianism with reformist new millennium proposals, such as a Green New Deal, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

At the UN Conference for Sustainable Development in 2012, the so-called Rio + 20 Summit, the ‘green economy’ concept played a key role as the guiding framework of the multilateral discussions, although resistance from many southern nations meant it was not as central as its proponents may have wished. In preparation for the summit, The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) published a report on ‘green economy’, defining it ‘as one that results in improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities’ (UNEP, 2011). In consonance with the pro-growth approach of sustainable development, the report bypassed any trade-off between economic growth and environmental conservation and conceptualized ‘nature‘as natural capital, a ‘critical economic asset’ opening the doors for commodification. In fact, it clearly stated that ‘the key aim for a transition to a green economy is to enable economic growth and investment while increasing environmental quality and social inclusiveness (UNEP, 2011).’

This environmental economics approach is based on neoclassical economic theory and a belief that economic growth will de-link or decouple itself from its environmental base through dematerialization and de-pollution because of the improvement in eco-efficiency, viz. increased resource productivity and decreased pollution. In this conceptual framework, market prices are considered the appropriate means for solving environmental issues and exogenous rates of technological progress are expected to counterbalance the effects of resource exhaustion. However, the conflict between a growth-dominated economy and environmental protection cannot be solved with appeals to ‘sustainable development‘, ‘eco-efficiency’, ‘ecological modernisation’, ‘geo-engineering’, ‘smart agricultures’ or ‘cities’, ‘circular’ or ‘green economy’. These are false solutions.

The sustainable development approach remains fundamentally flawed on a number of counts. For instance, the final objective for a New Green Deal is the creation of ‘resilient low carbon economies, rich in jobs and based on independent sources of energy supply’ (UNEP, 2011; NEF, 2008). While on this end there might general agreement, the controversy remains on the means. Among the flaws or weaknesses of the sustainable development approach as articulated thus far in various UN-sponsored documents, including the declaration Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, (UNEP, 2011; United Nations, 2013; SDSN, 2013; United Nations, 2015; United Nations Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Global Sustainability, 2012) are the following (Kothari, 2013):

• 1. ‘Absence of an analysis of the historical and structural roots of poverty, hunger, unsustainability and inequities, which include centralization of state power and capitalist monopolies;

• 2. Inadequate focus on direct democratic governance (decision-making by citizens and communities in face-to-face settings), beyond the stress on accountability and transparency;

• 3. Inability to recognize the biophysical limits to economic growth;

• 4. Continued subservience to private capital, and inability or unwillingness to democratise the economy;

• 5. Modern science and technology held up as panacea, ignoring their limits and marginalising other forms of knowledge;

• 6. Culture, ethics and spirituality side-lined;

• 7. Unbridled consumerism not tackled head-on;

• 8. Global relations built on localization and self-reliance missing; and,

• 9. No new architecture of global governance, with a continued reliance on the centrality of nation-states, denying true democratisation’.

These weaknesses outline why and how we consider the solutions that emerge out of sustainable development as false. In the next section, we instead present the alternatives that go beyond development embedding a real potential for transformation.

3 From the Critique of Development to Transformative Alternatives

A range of different and complementary notions or worldviews have emerged in various regions of the world that seek to envision and achieve more fundamental transformation than that proposed by the sustainable development approach. Some of these revive long-standing worldviews of indigenous peoples; some have emerged from recent social and environmental movements in but reflect old traditions and philosophies. Arising from different cultural and social contexts, they sometimes differ on the prescription (what shall be done how), but share the main characteristics of the diagnosis (what is the problem and who is responsible for it) as well as similar or equivalent worldviews. The Post-Development Dictionary aims to illuminate pathways towards a synergistic articulation of these alternatives to development (Salleh, 1994; Salleh, 1997; Kothari, 2015; Escobar, 2015).

Unlike sustainable development, which is a concept based on false ideological consensus, (Shiva, 1989; Hornborg, 2009) these alternative approaches are irreducible and therefore do not aspire to be adopted as a common goal of governance by the United Nations, the OECD or the African Union. These ideas are born as proposals for radical change from local to global. They reject the current development hegemony, meaning a critique of the homogenisation of cultures due to the widespread adoption of particular technologies and consumption and production models experienced in the global North (Escobar, 1995; Rist, 2003). The Western development model is understood here as an oxymoron (Latouche, 2009); a toxic term to be deconstructed and rejected (Dearden, 2014). In a post-political condition, (Swyngedouw, 2007) pluriversal alternatives affirm dissidence to re-politicise socio-ecological transformation. In short, it is urgent to dissolve the productivist concept of progress as a unidirectional concept, most especially its mechanistic view of economic growth (Kallis, 2015).

Deconstructing development opens up the door for a multiplicity of new and old notions and worldviews, or else a matrix of alternatives (Latouche, 2009). This includes Buen Vivir, a culture of life with different names and varieties in various regions of South America; Ubuntu, with its emphasis on human mutuality in South Africa and several equivalents in other parts of Africa; Swaraj, with a focus on self-reliance and self-governance, in India; and many others (Gudynas, 2011; Kothari, 2014; Metz, 2011). What is important is that while they are ancient, they are re-emerging in modified forms as a part of the narrative of movements that are struggling against development and/or asserting alternative forms of well-being. Ecofeminist arguments represent a further strand in this post-development rainbow (Shiva, 1989; Salleh, 1997).

These worldviews are not a novelty of the twenty-first cntury, but they are rather part of a long practice, ways of living forged in the furnace of humanity’s struggle for emancipation and enlightenment within rather than outside of nature. In fact, ecofeminists argue that such eco-sufficient knowledge constitutes a vernacular science, learned empirically through labour at the interface with nature (Salleh, 2009). What is remarkable about these alternative proposals, however, is that they often arise from traditionally marginalized groups. These worldviews are different from dominant Western ones as they emerge from non-capitalist communities or from non-capitalist spaces such as the household sector in the global North (Mies, 1986; Trainer, 1985). They are therefore independent of the anthropocentric and androcentric logic of capitalism, the dominant civilization, as well as with the various state socialist, effectively state capitalist models existing until now. Other approaches emerging from within industrialised countries can also break from dominant logic, such as is the case with degrowth, an example of non-occidentalist West (Sousa Santos, 2009; Demaria et al., 2013; D’Alisa et al., 2014).

Pluriversal alternatives may be distinguished from false solutions in a number of ways. Firstly, they seek to transform the structural roots of global injustice along political, economic, social, cultural and ecological axes. Secondly, they question the core assumptions of the development discourse – growth, material progress, instrumental rationality, the centrality of markets and economy, universality, modernity and its binaries. Thirdly, they encompass a radically different set of ethics and values to those underpinning the current system, including diversity, solidarity, commons, oneness with nature, interconnectedness, simplicity, inclusiveness, equity, non-hierarchy, pluriversality and peace.

At a time when neoliberal governments and rampant extractivism brutalise the everyday life of citizens across the world and in particular the global South, it is crucial that oppositional voices and people’s movements engage in a concentrated effort of research, outreach, dialogue and action, informed by and informing grassroots practice. Resistance is crucial, but it is not enough. We need our own narratives. Acts of resistance and regeneration offer hope in the here and now.

4 The Post-development Action-Research Agenda: Towards the Pluriverse

This chapter has laid out both a critique of sustainable development as well as the potential of a post-development agenda. It aims to deepen and widen a research, dialogue and action agenda for activists, policy makers and scholars on a variety of worldviews and practices relating to an emerging grassroots collective search for an ecologically wise and socially just world.

The future post-development action-research agenda must investigate the what, how, who and wy of everything that is transformative and also what is not. In particular, what need to be further investigated are:

• What do pluriversal alternatives to development have in common, and how do they differ?

• What potential for tensions and complementarities is there, given that the socio-ecological communities from which they emerge are rooted in specific territories and cultural contexts?

• How to deal with social differentiations of class, race, sex-gender, age, or ability, which are often culturally essentialised?

• What potential for tensions and complementarities is there? At local, national, regional or global level (e.g. Vikalp Sangam, and Global Tapestry of Alternatives).

• How to deal with contradictions within and among alternatives: e.g. pluriversality and universality, without resorting to universal criteria? For instance, how can we deal with those worlds that do not want to relate – ethno-nationalist and imperializing worlds – without going against the principles of the pluriverse?

• Faced with today’s global problems, how can the exploration of this pluriverse of alternatives to development, contribute most effectively to transcending the dominant and globalized sociocultural paradigm of industrial civilization?

In conclusion, these alternatives to development practices and worldviews intend to re-politicise the debate on much-needed socio-ecological transformation, affirming dissidence with the current world representations of sustainable development and searching for alternative ones. They highlight the necessity to overcome the modern ontology of one world and expand on the multiplicity of worlds possible. As Escobar argues: ‘The modern ontology presumes the existence of One World – a universe. This assumption is undermined by discussions in Transition Discourses, the buen vivir, and the Rights of Nature. In emphasizing the profound relationality of all life, these newer tendencies show that there are indeed relational worldviews or ontologies for which the world is always multiple – a pluriverse. Relational ontologies are those that eschew the divisions between nature and culture, individual and community, and between us and them that are central to the modern ontology. Some of today’s struggles could be seen as reflecting the defence and activation of relational communities and worldviews… and as such they could be read as ontological struggles; they refer to a different way of imagining life, to an other mode of existence. They point towards the pluriverse; in the successful formula of the Zapatista, the pluriverse can be described as “a world where many worlds fit” (Escobar, 2011, 2015).

Joan Martinez-Alier is an incredible observer always attentive to the changes in the world. With all his travels and readings, he has contributed to open new paths and directions towards the pluriverse.