| Chapter 1: | Introduction: Seeking Success, Finding Farmers |
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Redefining Postdevelopment
While this book's intent of going beyond success and failure betrays a sympathy toward alternative development, if not postdevelopment, it should be added that its broad aim is the juxtaposition of official and local meanings of development in order to build more complex meanings for development, rather than transcend the concept of development or render it immaterial. In this vein, Nederveen Pieterse (1998, 366) criticized discourses of postdevelopment as
The widespread circulation of ideas of development, in fact, has meant that they have become embedded within local identities as much as associated with the reach of the power of the state and new imperial formations. Postdevelopment could thus signal an understanding that development now coats the world even more powerfully than ever, whether in terms of its presence or its absence.
With this in mind, this book situates itself within discussions of postdevelopment in two specific ways. First, it seeks to outline an alternative genealogy of development—one that is attentive to local histories as much as to national histories. The notion of development as a manifestation of Western power and modernity is thereby complicated, though not completely dismissed. Second, this study locates development in the contemporary geopolitical context. Here, postdevelopment is the era of neoliberal development, characterized by a deliberate weakening of the state in its relationship to multinational capital, and a consequent inability to cater to the welfare of powerless segments of society