Introduction

The point of departure for this chapter is that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reiterate the promise of ‘development’ and thus continue to legitimise the capitalist world order. The claimed successes in poverty reduction are to a significant extent based on statistical manipulations. The SDG narrative neglects questions of the global economy being far more relevant to global poverty than Official Development Assistance. Being implicitly still oriented towards the ‘developed’ societies, it diffuses a model based on inequality, pollution, and non-sustainable use of resources. This chapter argues that post-development can offer alternatives to current practices in ‘development’ aid by raising issues such as the struggle of Indigenous peoples against ‘development’ projects and other models of organising society beyond the dominant paradigm of ‘development’.

To illustrate these issues this chapter draws on three cases: The Senegalese NGO Enda Graf Sahel, the Dongria Khond’s resistance to a mining project in India, and the Zapatista self-rule in Mexico. These are different types of post-development practices: alternatives to ‘development’ cooperation, protest against ‘development projects’, and an alternative based on non-Western models of politics, the economy, and knowledge. But first I outline some of the key concerns around the SDGs.

Challenging the SDGs

Franz Nuscheler introduced a whole generation of German students and ‘development professionals’ to development policy. He argued that the policy field at the beginning of the twenty-first century was in a “deep crisis of meaning and justification” (Nuscheler, 2001, p. 6). However, despite development’s ‘long register of sins’, Nuscheler (ibid.) vehemently opposed blanket criticism of development policy. Instead, and echoing a target of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), he argued that development policy could regain social acceptance if it succeeded in halving absolute poverty. This was the ‘acid test of development policy’ (ibid.). According to him, global structural policy was also necessary, a policy to change global economic structures to address poverty, conflicts, and environmental problems worldwide in the sense of an enlightened self-interest. Thus, development policy should not be narrowed down to development aid, and neither should it remain limited to the German Ministry of Development Cooperation (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit, in German), known as BMZ.

Now, 20 years on, the acid test has been passed, the halving of the number of people in extreme poverty (from 1.9 billion to 836 million) has been achieved (United Nations, 2015, p. 3), and the United Nations (UN) has set itself new targets with the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda. The programme on the BMZ homepage is displayed under the heading of a quote by UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon: “We can be the first generation to succeed in eradicating poverty…” (BMZ, 2017). The subsequent text reads like the wish list of development non-governmental organisations (NGOs): economic progress, social justice, ecological limits, new understanding of prosperity, responsible consumption, and production patterns. It also stresses that the industrialised countries must also change, that the focus is on the most vulnerable, and a life in dignity is formulated as a goal. As people interested in development policy and a more just world, we could be satisfied and toast to our successes. However, despite these achievements and laudable aspirations outlined in the SDGs, for people who have been in the business of ‘development’ for a while or are interested in history, Ban-Ki Moon’s sentence sounds rather familiar. We find it, mutatis mutandis, in the Millennium Declaration of 2000, in the Brandt Report of 1980, in the Declaration on the UN Development Decade in 1960, and in US President Truman’s inaugural address in 1949. It is a reprise of the promise of “development” that was used towards the end of the colonial era to convince newly independent countries that the elimination of poverty did not require the elimination of capitalism (Alcalde, 1987). In the historical context of the development discourse, it becomes apparent that the SDGs mainly consist of familiar discursive structures (see Ziai, 2016): the basic diagnosis that living conditions in “less developed” countries are a problem; the promise that “we” as humanity can solve the problem of poverty today; the central prescriptions of economic growth (increase in the production of goods and services exchanged through the market in the formal economy) and technical progress (which eliminates a lack of knowledge and technology); the credo that “development” is in the interest of all actors involved and that trade-offs between North and South, urban and rural, haves and have-nots, men and women, corporations and smallholders, ‘development’ agencies and target groups are secondary or can be resolved.

Contrary to the reports of success, critics such as Reddy and Pogge (2009) and Hickel (2016) have pointed out that the success of the MDG campaign in halving poverty is partly due to China and partly due to statistical manipulations, especially the starting year 1990 and the shifting of the International Poverty Line by the World Bank. For instance, in 1993, the setting of the international poverty line as a purchasing power parity of $1.08 represented an increase of only $0.02 in relation to 1985. When this value is adjusted for inflation, it represents that the poverty line was lowered. This transformed a massive increase in poverty in the last two decades of the twentieth century into a significant decline since 1990. The renewed shift to $1.25 in purchasing power parity in 2005 made this decline appear even more successful (437 instead of 316 million fewer people in poverty). Yet based on a more realistic perception of poverty not confined to its most extreme forms, we would require an International Poverty Line at least twice as high—which would reveal that there are about 350 million more poor people in 2014 than in 1981, or even 850 million if we exclude China (Hickel, 2016).

As Nuscheler notes (2001) (and critics before him since the 1970s), development cooperation is not central to people's living conditions. Instead, global economic structures tend to be much more important. Such a global structural policy became a government programme under the progressive government of the Social Democrats and the Green Party 1998–2005. The proponent of this policy was BMZ Minister Wieczorek-Zeul. Despite individual successes (HIPC-II debt relief and reform of structural adjustment, civil peace service), the overall balance sheet of her achievements is rather modest. In most cases, she did not succeed in asserting her ‘development policy logic’, i.e. to change global structures in favour of the South because this would prevent crises and conflicts that also have an impact on the North. Her cabinet colleagues held a different logic in which orthodox definitions of national interests prevailed, and thus pursued objectives like creating market access in the South for the benefit of German companies or using agricultural subsidies to strengthen their position in the global economy (Ziai, 2007). The global economic structures largely remained untouched. And so, even today, the SDG targets divert attention away from the fact that every year more than US$486 billion in profit repatriation by multinational companies and 575 billion in debt service flow from the South to the North, while thousands of people die each day because they cannot afford access to food, medicine, or clean water (Ellmers, 2016, p. 3; Griffiths, 2014, p. 20).

Yet although the SDGs are only the next band-aid designed to heal wounds caused by an inequality-producing global capitalism, the successes in poverty reduction—especially in China, but also in some other emerging countries—cannot be dismissed. However, in the light of its ecological consequences, Chinese policy cannot provide a shining example for progressive policymakers. A progressive policy must not be about the spread of a model of society that depends on the appropriation of cheap raw materials and labour in other regions, wastes non-renewable resources and destroys the climate, but about the limitation and liquidation of such a model in favour of solidarity-based and ecological alternatives—first and foremost in the North.

Although neocolonial practices in the global economy can easily be found (Langan, 2018; Ziai, 2020), the main actors of such practices are not confined to the North. Land-grabbing countries like China, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and India also play a central role. These economic-geographical shifts do not make those practices any better. From a postcolonial perspective, the emergence of a global middle class, an increasing part of which comes from the South, is on the one hand a step towards greater justice. On the other hand, this step remains on the road of industrial capitalism, thus often contributing to restricting access to land and livelihoods for those not belonging to this class and preventing the preservation or construction of alternative systems. As Sachs (2010, p. x) writes, “The shiny side of development is often accompanied by a dark side of displacement and dispossession”.

Post-development: Conceptual Reflections

The post-development school of thought gained prominence during the 1990s with three seminal publications (Escobar, 1995; Rahnema, 1997; Sachs, 1992) which attempted to leave behind the paradigm of ‘development’. Post-development theorists criticised the conflation of a good society with the Western model of society, questioned the necessity of universalising this model in the non-West and argued for ‘alternatives to development’ (Escobar, 1995, p. 215). Yet although they lucidly pointed out that the term ‘development’ was attributed to a host of heterogeneous practices which made it a shapeless, ‘amoeba-like concept’ (Sachs, 1992, p. 4), they failed to realise that their criticisms and post-development alternatives correspondingly were also very diverse: if ‘development’ can mean many things, so can ‘post-development’. These authors saw ‘development’ as a false promise of affluence given to maintain a colonial division of labour, a failed project of universalising Western models, a hierarchic and Eurocentric construct regarding non-Western societies as backward and inferior, a process of spreading a capitalist rationality dis-valuing activities regarded as non-productive by orthodox economics, and a strategy of legitimating interventions referring to progress and the greater common good (Ziai, 2015).

Within academia, post-development has been seen variously as neo-populist and potentially reactionary, advocating a return to traditional subsistence communities, and as an approach that does not want to prescribe a particular model of society, instead conceiving cultures as dynamic and seeing room for constructive engagement with modernity (Ziai, 2004). It has also been shown that the critique of PD is increasingly acknowledged, but that ‘alternatives to development' are generally seen as unrealistic or misguided (Ziai, 2019). Most people in the global South are very much interested in ‘development’ in the sense of a successful universalisation of Western models (Matthews, 2019), as ‘the desire for recognition and equity is framed in terms of the civilizational model of the powerful nations’ (Sachs, 2010, p. viii). Another feature of the debate was that many critics of post-development have asserted that it provided “critique but no construction” (Nederveen Pieterse, 2000, p. 182). Thus, the alternatives appear to be the least convincing or credible parts of the critique, so that an inquiry should focus on them. At the same time, such an inquiry should consider the heterogeneity of the alternatives.

This chapter thus investigates these post-development alternatives to ‘development’, drawing on three contrasting examples. To address the controversy around these alternatives being misguided if they are based on a rejection of Western models, this chapter also examines the extent to which the people on the ground desire these models and the ways in which their ideas and practices diverge from them. In this context, Western models will be understood as those that have become hegemonic in the societies of Western Europe and North America in the fields of economics (capitalism based on private ownership of the means of production, competition, and the homo oeconomicus), politics (representative multi-party parliamentary democracies with professional politicians and a free mandate in the context of nation-states) and science (Western, positivist science which regards itself as the only valid system and nature as dead matter to be explored and dominated).

As another pertinent critique of post-development, Kiely (1999, pp. 36–41) has asserted that the alternatives are confined to the local level and evade the problem of upscaling and, correspondingly, of relations of power in global capitalism on the national and international level. One of the case studies below will also look at large-scale alternatives at the regional level.

Enda Graf Sahel: Supporting Local Networks in Dakar/Senegal

Enda Graf Sahel is a Senegalese NGO that is part of the larger international NGO Enda Third World. It aims to look for ‘alternatives to development’, encompassing all dimensions in which poverty can be reduced and local initiatives can be promoted (Enda Graf Sahel, 2022). It has been operating in Grand-Yoff, in the periphery of Dakar, since 1975. Enda Graf Sahel began as an ordinary NGO working in the field of ‘development’, through projects and programmes in the areas of health, youth unemployment, and income generation, receiving money from Northern agencies. After a while, however, its members realised that their activities, aiming to transform the local communities according to the ideas of the ‘development’ agencies, failed to achieve their stated goals and produced no lasting results, and that they often isolated individuals from their own social space (Matthews, 2007, p. 133; N’Dione et al., 1997, p. 367). Even worse, they found that their work taught the people that their way of life was deficient in comparison to the West and thus had served to reproduce a ‘poverty-generating ideology … inviting the penetration of the dominant economic logic’ which helped to spread ‘a culture dominated by the values of a monetary economy … substituting all other kinds of thinking’ (N’Dione et al., 1997, p. 367). Emmanuel N’Dione, president of Enda Graf Sahel, and his collaborators argue that the ‘development culture’ promotes ‘the universalising claims of the development model’, ‘the commodification of people and goods’, and ‘the cult of statistics and competition between individuals’ and thus ‘engenders impoverishment and loneliness’ (N’Dione et al., 1997, p. 368). Realising that implicitly they were telling communities that they need to adopt Western concepts and practices and goods, they arrived at a self-critical diagnosis: ‘By depreciating the capacity to be self-sufficient and being satisfied with local resources, the development ideology is creating poverty’ (ibid.). For them, ‘development’ is based on ‘the idea that needs must be satisfied at all costs’ and can be described as ‘an enterprise that aims at progressive satisfaction of needs less and less related so subsistence’. They consider it ‘absurd to accumulate an increasing heap of material ‘riches’’ and to claim ‘that such riches, one day, will be the lot of a humanity that is constantly growing in numbers’ (ibid.). Correspondingly, they reject the idea that what is valid for the West must be valid for everyone: ‘if they have been able to accumulate a certain quantity of goods through industrialisation and have received a certain satisfaction from it, then this model must be universally adopted’ (ibid.). On the other hand, they readily admit that accumulation of resources and investments in certain sectors are necessary’.

The parallels with the post-development critique are clear. Enda Graf Sahel criticises the universalisation of Western models and the spread of capitalist rationality, commodification, and competition, together with the notion of infinite needs and scarce resources (see Esteva, 1992). They question the dominant notion of wealth and the promise of universal affluence through ‘development’ and even argue that a ‘creation of poverty’ (N’Dione et al., 1997, p. 368) takes place through the production of needs which cannot be satisfied locally. Yet they do not dismiss economic growth in general and are interested in poverty reduction. Let’s look at their alternatives.

On the conceptual level, their ideas of wealth and of knowledge are particularly interesting. Rejecting the idea that the laws of the market can establish the value of things, they suggest that relationships, in particular networks of mutual aid, constitute the wealth of the poor and argue that wealth can be identified in the level of integration of people in their natural, social, and spiritual environment. Thus, they propose a different way of evaluating societies:

If we were to evaluate the wealth of a society by its level of independence or autonomy vis-a-vis the foreigner, the far-off, the unknown; if we were to assess it according to its capacity to integrate and ‘include’ the greatest number of people; if we also assessed its capacity to redistribute—one would be led to conclude that many in the West live in a state of poverty and precariousness. (N’Dione et al., 1997, p. 369)

Enda Graf Sahel describes relations of power resulting from hierarchies in knowledge:

Things are no longer true or false because they have been tested by people themselves (…) but because they coincide with an explanation that has been legitimized by foreign authorities: Science, Religion, Reason (…) When people are dispossessed of their capacity to explain the reasons for things, they become culturally dominated and disposed to accept their own exclusion. (N’Dione et al., 1997, p. 373)

Thus, the hierarchy between what the ‘development experts’ believe and what the locals believe becomes visible: only the former beliefs count as universal, objective knowledge: ‘the truths of the poor (…) are only beliefs that come up against the knowledge of those who hold the levers of power’ (N’Dione et al., 1997, p. 375). The alternative Enda Graf Sahel promotes is to see knowledge systems as relative to certain groups, spaces, and epochs, recognising and rehabilitating the value of the know-how and the beliefs of the underprivileged, without endorsing relativism: ‘the search for a more just society must start out by legitimising all beliefs (which is not the same thing as subscribing to all beliefs)’ (N’Dione et al., 1997, p. 375). Here, they are anticipating the call by scholar activist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who recognised that the knowledge of the oppressed is a condition to achieve a more just world: there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice (Santos, 2014).

After their crisis in the 1980s, Enda Graf Sahel decided to exclusively support existing community networks instead of implementing traditional ‘development’ projects. Challenging the distinction between ‘development experts’ and ‘target groups’, they started to integrate themselves in these communities and to ‘build upon the community’s ways of addressing their problems rather than presenting themselves as ‘saviours’ of the community, especially its poor’ (Matthews, 2007, p. 133). This corresponds to post-development’s rejection of the claim that outsiders, referred to as ‘trustees’ by Cowen and Shenton (1996), know better how to solve people’s problems than the people themselves (partly contradicting Spivak (1988) who insisted on the importance of organic intellectuals representing the subaltern and their interests). It also corresponds with Ferguson’s (1994) epilogue of his study, in which he answers the question what the poor should do to improve their lives with the confident reply that they are already doing, they themselves knowing best their situation and their capacities.

Matthews (2007, p. 137), who analysed the work of Enda Graf Sahel, observed that the skills of outsiders were still often deemed useful by the underprivileged, but that their role changed significantly from that of experts to facilitators, brokers, and agents. In their own words, the facilitator ‘has a supporting role in a script to be written by the farmers themselves’ (N’Dione et al., 1995, p. xiii). Thus, the role of the NGO changed according to the desires and requirements of the networks, their task being redefined as putting community groups in contact with one another, providing access to funding for small, local initiatives, and revalorising disparaged value systems, knowledges, languages, and ways of living (Matthews, 2007, p. 137). For that, it was not enough that the NGO valued the capacities of the local people: they themselves had to learn to value them (N’Dione et al., 1995, p. xv).

This process of prioritising the desires of the people themselves included surprises for the EGS staff: ‘community members seemed more interested in the possibility of Enda Graf Sahel providing flexible loans and of bringing Enda Graf Sahel into local social networks, thereby improving access of Grand Yoff community members to the relatively powerful and high-status people’ (Matthews, 2007, p. 135). Yet the less privileged, contrary to the original ideas of the staff, insisted on engaging the more privileged and not in an oppositional manner. And although the networks that people made use of were characterised by reciprocity, they were often neither transparent nor egalitarian. In the end, this holds true for Enda Graf Sahel as well, with N’Dione occupying a central role, although he himself downplays this and refuses to take the lead when he is expected to (ibid., p. 139).

Matthews sees the NGO’s strategy of supporting popular initiatives as a post-development practice, because it is ‘responding to many of the problems traditionally highlighted in development studies – poverty, inequity, oppression and the like – in a way that takes the arguments made in post-development theory into account’ (ibid., p. 134), namely a sensitivity towards difference and a questioning of the authority of the expert. There are potential contradictions between denouncing capitalism and supporting microcredit or promoting reliance on one’s own resources while providing access to aid funding. However, I agree with Matthews also on the grounds of the numerous parallels pointed out above between Enda Graf Sahel’s theory and practice and post-development. But of course, this variant of post-development pragmatically works with the existing relations of power and distribution of wealth, trying to shift them in favour of the less privileged, but without striving for an anti-capitalist, anarchist utopia. Yet this is merely a result of renouncing the role of the expert and putting people’s desires and needs at centre stage, as demanded by a more sceptical post-development approach.

While it is a pragmatic strategy to make use of existing networks and the apparatus of international development cooperation to improve lives, there are (often rural) Indigenous communities who feel that their livelihoods are threatened by the advent of modern infrastructure projects, and who consequently opt for a fundamentally different approach. The next case study will turn to one of them.

The Dongria Khond of the Niyamgiri Hills: Indigenous Resistance Against ‘Development’ in Odisha/India

The Dongria Khond are a small Adivasi community of about 8,000 people living in the Niyamgiri Hills, in the state of Odisha in Eastern India. Since at least 2006, they have been engaged in a conflict with Vedanta Aluminium Limited, one of the largest mining corporations, around a Bauxite mine and refinery in the area where they live. While the president of Vedanta claims the project would lead to the ‘development’ of the region and benefit its inhabitants (Vedanta, 2012, p. 4), there have been sustained protests especially by the Dongria Khond which took various forms ranging from written petitions to Indian courts to demonstrations. After the refinery was built in 2006, circumventing legal environmental and social requirements, the permission to clear the forest for mining was withheld in 2010. The Supreme Court then insisted on the peoples’ consent and all tribal villages voted against the project in 2013. Finally, the Ministry for Environment, Forests and Climate Change stopped the project in 2014 (Tatpati et al., 2018). The Dongria Khond’s campaign was supported by NGOs such as Amnesty International and Survival International, as well as by celebrities like Arundhati Roy and Michael Palin (Hopkins, 2010).

Critics of post-development have consistently pointed out that many people in the global South are indeed very much interested in ‘development’ in the sense of enjoying a lifestyle like the middle class in the rich, modern, industrialised countries (e.g. Matthews, 2019). But the determined rejection of a modern infrastructure project by the Dongria Khond suggests that some are indeed much more interested in preserving their traditional way of life, as suggested by Lado Sikaka, leader of Lakhpadar village, in his reply to the question ‘How do you see yourselves in the future?’:

After 10 years or more, I see us as what we are today. We don’t want change. Change will mean that everything will be lost – our culture, our language. Some people are stepping out to study, but when they come back they’ve lost everything. What is a man without an identity? See what has happened at Lanjigarh. When the company [Vedanta] was not there, the Kui folk [Kutia and Desia Kondh] were like us, we lived like brothers. You could identify them as Kandha [Kondhs]. But when the company came, everything changed. Land was lost, culture was lost, and identity was lost. Now, they are labourers. They were kings, owners of their own land before. Now you cannot make out who is Pano, who is Kandho, everything is mixed. What is the use of that kind of development? We will at the end become labourers. Now, they are opposing us Dongria. The brother is opposing the brother. (cited in Tatpati et al., 2018, p. 93)

Pointing to the consequences of the refinery in the neighbouring community of Lanjigarh, Lado Sikaka laments the loss of culture, language, and identity and demands their preservation against any kind of contact with Western modernity. He also argues that capitalism reduces people to wage labourers and ‘turns brother against brother’ (ibid.), i.e. provokes conflict within formerly peaceful social groups (see also Taussig, 2010). This resonates with the neo-populist current in post-development (see for example Norberg-Hodge, 2009) which sees harmonious traditional communities suffer under the onslaught of Western modernity and ‘development’, the latter sometimes even being compared to a contagious disease (Rahnema, 1997). This view is also taken in the representation of the struggle of the Dongria Khond by Survival International, most visible in their 2009 short film Mine—Story of a Sacred Mountain, which also emphasises the spiritual dimension of the struggle.Footnote 1 The film was advertised with the slogan ‘The Real Avatar’, alluding to a Hollywood movie in which peaceful aliens defend their sacred tree against human colonisers, and the message was clear: support the Indigenous Dongria Khond in their struggle against Vedanta, the destruction of their environment, and Western modernity in general.

As Wilson (2019, pp. 146–151) lucidly pointed out, this way of representing the struggle of the Dongria Khond not only reproduces the stereotype of the noble savage and binary oppositions between ‘development’ and Indigenous resistance, but it also misrepresents their struggle or at least silences many political aspects of it. This can already be seen by comparing the Survival International film to the documentary Wira Pdika, in which Khond people themselves describe their struggle without any narration or voiceovers. It shows armed protesters, political demonstrations, people recounting their experiences of police brutality and demanding schools or hospitals, also using modern technology in the form of buses and loudspeakers—elements which are absent in ‘The Real Avatar’ film. All in all, in the few available public scenes of the movie,Footnote 2 the Khond people’s struggle hardly resembles the noble savage narrative from Survival International but looks a lot like protests against state repression and corporate interests in other parts of the world.

So, are we to reject the romanticising representation of Survival International and admit that even the Dongria Khond want ‘development’ in the form of roads, schools, hospitals, and electricity? A more in-depth study by Tatpati et al. (2018) suggests a more complicated answer. According to this study, they do want roads, but not tarred roads suitable for cars and trucks because this would prove disastrous for their culture. They want schools, but local schools with Adivasi teachers speaking Kui, not boarding schools where children have to leave their homes to be taught in languages they do not understand. They want electricity, but only if it is coming from solar panels and not from hazardous high-tension wires (ibid., p. 102f). And they want hospitals because their traditional medicinal knowledge is eroding (partly through government action) and becoming less effective due to outside influences like new pesticides and illnesses, or non-traditional food that makes bodies impervious to natural cures (ibid., p. 105f). In general, the Dongria Khond practice an ‘economy of restraint’ (Tatpati et al., 2018, p. 92) which rejects the idea of unlimited growth and disallows unsustainable exploitation of the forest. This is embedded in a religious world view perceiving the land on which they live as sacred. Thus, the Dongria Khond’s mode of living clearly does not correspond to the Western model and can be seen as an alternative to development. Yet, people are increasingly dependent on money and liquor indulgence, a trend that is perceived as problematic (Tatpati et al., 2018, p. 104).

Large parts of the Dongria Khond do not perceive their old way of life as inferior. Instead, they believe that their lives are being undermined without a viable alternative (Esteva, 1992, p. 20; Tatpati et al., 2018, p. 109). This leads us beyond either-or-solutions to what Matthews (2019, p. 111) has described as ‘the picking apart of development, taking what is useful and discarding what is not’. While this is difficult to reconcile with a neo-populist post-development discourse demanding a return to traditional subsistence communities, it corresponds to the argument that ‘the idea, then, in spite of ‘development’, is to organize and invent new ways of life - between modernisation, with its sufferings but also some advantages, and a tradition from which people may derive inspiration while knowing it can never be revived’ (Rist, 1997, p. 244, see also Escobar, 1995, pp. 217–222).

Yet the Niyamgiri experience leads to further questions: what if the Supreme Court had decided in favour of the mining? Could the resistance have been upheld against State forces? And could post-development alternatives survive if they were indeed endangering capitalist accumulation? Our third example provides an opportunity to address these questions.

The Zapatistas: Armed Insurrection and Regional Autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico

After a decade of organising and preparation, the mostly Indigenous Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional or EZLN) launched an insurrection against the Mexican State on the 1st of January of 1994. The Zapatistas occupied four towns in the South-Eastern province of Chiapas. Triggered by the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had required abandoning article 27 of the Mexican constitution protecting communal property from the market, the insurrection rejected neoliberalism and demanded Indigenous rights, democracy, and freedom (Kerkeling, 2006). After twelve days of fighting, the government—under pressure from massive support for the uprising in civil society—declared a ceasefire and entered negotiations. Although these turned out to be unsatisfactory, both parties have refrained from returning to a full-blown armed conflict. Nonetheless, the government engaged in a low intensity conflict against the Zapatistas—with the 1997 massacre of Acteal being the most violent example of this—and employed paramilitary groups as threats and ‘development projects’ as incentives to stop mobilisation. Although only 4% of the Mexican population lives in the province of Chiapas, over one-third of its military can be found there. However, despite the conflict, there is a functioning Zapatista self-rule in about 1,000 villages since 1994, in which roughly 200,000 people organise themselves without any support of the ‘bad government’, as they call it (Gilgenbach & Moser, 2012, p. 14).

Gustavo Esteva (1997), who acted as an advisor to the Zapatistas, claims that the uprising was directed not only against 500 years of colonial oppression and racism, but also against 40 years of ‘development’. He argues that the Zapatistas do not seek an expansion of the economy in terms of either market-led or State-led growth, but rather the protection of the commons. They would ‘keep alive their own life-support systems based on self-reliance and mutual help, informal networks for direct exchange of goods, services and information, and an administration of justice which calls for compensation more than punishment’ (Esteva, 1997, p. 303).

The EZLN professes an understanding of politics which is not centred on taking State power, but on proceeding through questioning, i.e. on rejecting avant-garde claims of how society should be transformed from above (Kerkeling, 2006, p. 261). The Zapatistas do not claim to represent all Indigenous groups. Instead, they invite other groups to join negotiations with the government. Although the EZLN are sceptical towards bad governments and their homogenising claims, their aim is to reach democratic autonomy within the Mexican State. According to their understanding, the role of representatives is to govern only by obeying the will of the people (mandar obedeciendo, in Spanish). In practice, this translates into a grassroots democracy at the levels of villages, districts, and regions, the latter being administratively constituted by ‘Good Government Councils’ (Juntas de Buen Gobierno). There is no central authority and there are no parties. All political offices rotate to prevent the emergence of a class of professional politicians and are non-remunerated. Meanwhile, other farmers take care of office holders’ crop fields. Representatives can also be voted down at any time (Gilgenbach & Moser, 2012). Women’s rights occupy a special place in the EZLN, with women’s law directed against ‘bad’ patriarchal traditions (Kerkeling, 2006).

Economically, the Zapatista insurrection started with the revolutionary agrarian law which decreed that land possessions above 50 hectares are occupied, expropriated, and distributed to collectives and landless people. This amounted to over 100,000 hectares by the end of 1994, although there are no exact figures for the present (Kerkeling, 2006, p. 174). Ecological agriculture is deemed increasingly important to produce healthy food and gain independence from pesticides and corporations. In the Zapatista economy, subsistence agriculture and production for the market exist side by side, just like individual or family ownership and cooperatives or collectives which seek to overcome capitalist relations. Several hundred Tzotzil families have formed the cooperative Mut Vitz which exports coffee to Europe and the US. There are also a number of democratically organised women’s cooperatives producing handicraft for the market. Thus, despite the anticapitalistic rhetoric, there is a mixed economy combining different elements, partly because many people are interested in monetary income (Gilgenbach & Moser, 2012, pp. 17–19; Kerkeling, 2006, p. 187).

The traditional knowledge of healers (particularly women) is held in high esteem and there are organisations of midwives and herbal healers to institutionalise skill sharing and transfer of knowledge to the next generation, in the prevailing absence of hospitals and doctors. Yet they are also employing techniques and instruments taken from modern medicine and readily admit that their traditional knowledge is unfit to deal with problems of surgery. Therefore, their relation to modern medicine is ambivalent: on the one hand it displaces traditional knowledge, on the other hand it helps the healers in their work. Yet the Zapatistas have established a health system, which makes use of both knowledge systems (Gilgenbach & Moser, 2012, pp. 20–22). And just like the Dongria Khond envisioned, the Zapatistas have built local schools where practical knowledge is taught in Indigenous languages (Kerkeling, 2006, pp. 179–186).

The regional autonomy of the Zapatistas can also be interpreted as a type of post-development practice, insisting on grassroots democracy vis-à-vis the party system, rejecting projects of ‘development’ and any cooperation with the state and multinational corporations, valorising the knowledge of traditional healers. However, there is neither an uncritical embracing of tradition nor a wholesale commitment to Western modernity, but a selective engagement with both. In politics, economy, and knowledge, the Zapatistas clearly deviate from the model of the industrialised, capitalist societies and prove that workable alternatives to development do exist.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have looked at three different types of post-development practices: alternatives to ‘development’ cooperation in Dakar, Senegal; resistance against ‘development projects’ in Niyamgiri, India; and an alternative based on non-Western models of politics, the economy, and knowledge in Chiapas, Mexico. We found that in all three cases, the rejection of Eurocentrism and the divergence of local people’s ideas and practices from the model of ‘developed’ societies was coupled with a selective engagement of certain elements of what was seen as ‘development’. These included, for example, access to project funding in Dakar, access to certain types of roads, schools, and hospitals in Niyamgiri, and access to modern medicine and the global market in Chiapas.

The empirical examples yield three main arguments for post-development theory. Firstly, with practices that clearly incorporate elements of post-development theory, they support Esteva’s (1992, p. 17) claim that post-development is a theorisation of grassroots practices in the global South. Secondly, because of a common selective engagement with Western culture, the empirical examples correspond more to the moderate, sceptical variant of post-development as hybrid practices. Thirdly, if post-development is a ‘rear-guard theory’ (Santos, 2014, p. ix), rather than a vanguard theory with a clear blueprint of positive social change and capable of telling social movements what to do, this also directs us towards the sceptical variant. If claims about ‘colonised minds’ (Matthews, 2019) are to be avoided, neo-populist post-development cannot be an option. Of course, it may well be that people’s ideas of a good society have in fact been heavily influenced by images of European superiority. However, claiming to know better what is good for people would merely lead to assuming the role of the trustees again and reproduce the hierarchies of development discourse. The task ahead is to disentangle the idea of a good society from the model of the industrialised affluent societies. And for this, examples of post-development in the North (Bendix et al., 2019) are crucial. Yet for the global South, the case studies presented clearly show that people not everywhere want to live like those in the affluent industrial capitalist regions—and thus challenge the paradigm of ‘development’. Alternatives to colonial global capitalism exist.