This article is part of a series of contributions from the book Pluriverse – A Post-Development Dictionary, dedicated to all those who fight for the pluriverse by resisting injustice and seeking ways to live in harmony with nature. The world we want is one in which many worlds coexist.
By Maristella Svampa
Critical approaches to the hegemonic notion of development have existed in Latin America since the early discussions of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth. Critiques have ranged from debates on sustainable development to contemporary critique of the expansion of the commodity frontier. I would like to highlight three key moments in Latin American thought: the critique of consumer society (1970s–80s); the post-development critique (1990s–2000s); and critical perspectives on extractivism (early 2000s– present).
The first phase is best illustrated by Brazilian economist, Celso Furtado, development and its crises: global experiences 19 who, in gaining distance from the classic perspectives of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, ECLAC, argued that one of the indirect conclusions of the ‘limits’ argument, was that the lifestyle promoted by capitalism would only be viable for industrialized countries and elite minorities within underdeveloped ones. Any attempt to generalize the consumerist way of life would lead to the collapse of the system.
In the same vein, the Argentina-based interdisciplinary group Fundación Bariloche, coordinated by Amilcar Herrera, maintained that behind the report there lay the neo-Malthusian logic characteristic of hegemonic development discourses. In 1975, this group created an alternative model titled Catástrofe o Nueva Sociedad? Modelo Mundial Latinoamericano [Catastrophe or New Society? A Latin American World Model], which argued that environmental degradation and the devastation of natural resources were not due to population growth but due to the high consumption rates in rich countries, de facto enacting a division between ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries. The corollary of this perspective was that the privileged populations of the planet would have to lower their excessive consumption patterns and diminish their rates of economic growth in order to reduce the pressure on natural resources and the environment. Although these critiques did not escape the dominant logic of productivism, which saw limitless economic growth as a value in and of itself, they did have the virtue of questioning the dominant episteme.
Other concepts in the 1980s similarly emphasized critiques of consumption. Among them were the notion of ‘human-scale development’ and the ‘theory of human needs’ developed by Chilean economist, Manfred Max Neef. A further poignant cultural critique of post-industrial society emphasizing its instrumental rationality and crass materialism, came with Ivan Illich’s highly influential notion of ‘conviviality’. Hence, in this first moment, the thrust of the development critique involved re-thinking consumption and cultural patterns in favour of the common good, and egalitarian societies founded on more austere life styles and longer-lasting productive systems.
The second moment, associated with the post-developmentalist perspective, centred on development as a discourse of power. Here, we highlight the contribution of Gustavo Esteva in the Development Dictionary, coordinated by Wolfgang Sachs (1992), who elaborated a radical critique underscoring the colonial matrix of the idea as a post-war (1949) invention on the part of the United States and other Western powers.
Another notable contribution within this line of thinking was Arturo Escobar’s deconstruction of the modern concept of development as an instrument 20 pluriverse of domination, revealing its main mechanisms of operation: the division between development and underdevelopment; the professionalization of development ‘problems’ and the rise of ‘development experts’; and the institutionalization of development through a network of national, regional, and international organizations. Escobar highlighted the ways in which development made invisible diverse local experiences and knowledge. He further suggested, already in the mid-1990s, a shift away from thinking about ‘alternative Development’ towards ‘alternatives to Development’.
A third, and current, phase began in the early 2000s with the critique of existing neo-extractivism and the start of the Commodity Consensus. This phase spurred a critique of the productivist logic underlying development and of the expansion of extractive mega-projects (large-scale mining, oil extraction, new agrarian capitalism with its combination of genetically modified organisms and agro-chemicals, large-scale dams, mega-real estate projects, among others). Such new forms of extractivism are characterized by the intensive occupation of territories, land grabbing, and the destructive appropriation of nature for export. While extractivism refers to the overexploitation and large-scale export of primary goods from Latin America to core and emerging economies, the notion of Commodity Consensus suggests that, similar to the Washington Consensus, there is an agreement – increasingly explicit every year – around the irreversible or irresistible nature of the current extractivist model.
This inevitability forecloses the possibility of considering alternatives to current development models. Beyond alleged comparative advantages, such as high international prices, these trends have deepened the historic role of the region as a provider of raw materials. It has also intensified asymmetries between the global economic centre and its peripheries, as reflected in the trend towards re-primarization of national economies and the uneven distribution of socio-environmental conflicts.
Unlike the previous two analytic phases, the current one has seen explicit re-signification of the environmental question, this time in relation to territories, politics, and civilization. This ‘environmentalization of struggles’ as Enrique Leff would say, is reflected in diverse eco-social-territorial movements directed against private sector transnational corporations and the state. Such movements have broadened and radicalized their discursive positions, incorporating other issues such as the critique of mono-cultural development models. This politics reveals a crisis of the instrumental and anthropocentric view of nature with its dualist and hierarchical ontology.
Given this epistemic–political landscape, we are witnessing the consolidation of a radical new environmental rationality and postdevelopmentalist vision. Horizon-concepts such as buen vivir, bienes development and its crises: global experiences 21 communes or common goods, ethics of care, food sovereignty, autonomy, rights of nature, and relational ontologies are key elements of this recent dialectical turn in Latin American critical thought. This turn synthesizes contributions of previous periods, integrates the critique of consumption models and dominant cultural patterns and recasts the post-development perspective.
Pressenza publishes a series of excerpts from ‘Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary’ with the courtesy of the publishers and under a Creative Commons licence: CC-BY-NC-ND. The book is available free of charge in English as a PDF file
Further Resources
Escobar, Arturo (2014), Sentipensar con la tierra: Nuevas lecturas sobre desarrollo, territorio y diferencia. Medellín, Colombia: Ediciones Unaula, https://mundoroto. files.wordpress.com/2015/03/sentipensar-con-la-tierra.pdf.
Esteva, Gustavo (1992), ‘Development’, in Wolfgang Sachs (ed.), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London and New York: Zed Books.
Grupo Permanente de Trabajo sobre Alternativas al Desarrollo, http://www.rosalux. org.ec/grupo/.
Gudynas, Eduardo (2015), Extractivismos: Ecología, economía y política de un modo de entender el desarrollo y la Naturaleza. Cochabamba: Cedib/Claes.
Illich, Ivan (1973), Tools for Conviviality. London: Boyars.
Svampa, Maristella (2016), Debates Latinoamericanos. Indianismo, Desarrollo, Dependencia y Populismo. Buenos Aires: Edhasa.
The author: Maristella Svampa is an Argentinian sociologist, writer, and researcher within the Argentinean National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). She is Professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina, and the author of several books on political sociology and social movements, as well as several fiction books. She is a Member of the Permanent Group on Alternatives to Development established by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.