CALL FOR PAPERS

The Asian Political and International Studies Association (APISA, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), will convene an international workshop within the framework of the Africa/Asia/Latin America Scholarly Collaborative Program. The theme of the workshop is Rethinking Development Alternatives in the South: Prospects for Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The workshop will be convened in Ho Chi Minh City from 5-6 October 2007. The concept paper and a tentative program are outlined below.

ELIGIBILITY FOR PARTICIPATION:

Scholars resident in countries of the South and who are pursuing active academic careers are eligible to apply to participate in the seminars. Each applicant should have an advanced university education and an established track record of research and publishing in any of the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. Selection for participation will be on the basis of a competitive process. All together, 12 people will be selected for participation in the institute on the basis of four each from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The full participation costs of the selected laureates will be covered, including their travel costs (economy return air tickets), accommodation and subsistence.

It is a requirement that prospective laureates should have a demonstrable working knowledge of the English language.

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS:

Every researcher wishing to be considered for selection as one of the 12 scholars to be invited to participate in any of the comparative research seminars organised within the framework of the APISA-CLACSO-CODESRIA tri-continental partnership is required to submit an application that will comprise the following key items of documentation:

a) An outline research proposal, written in English, on the subject on which s/he would like to work. Proposals should not exceed 10 pages in length and should have a clearly defined problematic which can be followed through further research and culminate in a publishable scientific paper;

b) A covering letter, of one-page, which should indicate the motivation of the prospective researcher for wanting to participate in the seminar series and explaining how they envisage that they and their institution will benefit from the programme;

Concept Paper

Rethinking Development for the South: Prospects for Asia, Africa, and Latin America

An apt analogy for the South’s experience of development is suggested by the juxtaposition of the concepts colonialism/development. Reading through mainstream development thinking as well as the experience of neoliberal structural adjustments reminds of colonial discourse and practices.

This analogy is instructive. It puts together the typically negative view of colonialism with the generally positive outlook on development. Locating colonialism and development side by side is not something new. A number of scholars have invested time and resources in efforts to identify and describe continuities and breaks between the two, tangentially or directly. Some of these efforts attribute current development impediments to the colonial experience. Mahoney,1 for example, finds that colonies peripheral to the Spanish empire are more developed than those territories considered as its centers. Underdevelopment, in this case, then becomes a legacy of direct and intensive Spanish colonial rule. Also, Engerman and Sokoloff2 observe that the efforts of European colonialism to alter the composition of populations in colonized areas contributed to extreme inequality between colonists and “natives,” which in turn evolved persistent institutions that restricts access to economic opportunities as well as discourages public investment in infrastructures that are necessary to growth. Other researches, meanwhile, find links in colonial and developmental practices. Cooke,3 for example, asserts that development management owes to colonial administration, specifically to indirect rule, its recently adopted set of participatory methods that promotes “ownership” of development interventions. Cooke argues that achieving “empowerment” through participation was subject to the colonial sovereign power and the seeming autonomy it granted was a way of reproducing that power. Also, Kothari4 explores how the professionalisation of international development facilitates the expansion of neoliberal agenda in development agencies, and how the "alternative" approaches are co-opted onto this agenda. In relation to this, she focuses on the key figure of the development "experts" and their role in the reproduction of systems of expertise and forms of authority that they articulate. Her research on former UK colonial officers who worked in the post-colonial development industry is then drawn upon to illustrate the continuities and divergences of the colonial to current discourses of development.

The colonialism/development juxtaposition, thus, suggests legacies, continuity, overlap, shared rationale, common practices. As demonstrated by the above literature, it enables us into a position that demands a rethinking of development. A rethinking that requires dealing with the assumptions of development, its theories, concerns and processes. Rethinking also takes us into the terrain of critique and alternatives to development.

However, years and voluminous documentations of development reflections, critique and alternatives have not displaced the hegemonic role of the Bretton Woods institutions and their development models. We continue to believe that we will get to where the North is by following what the North does (or did). And our rethinkings remain marginal, alternatives that never quite make it into actual development policies and practices.

Taking the colonialism/development analogy further: What can decolonization and the after-colonial teach us about an after development that is dominated/determined by the supposed wealth and knowledge of North experience? How do we free ourselves from IMF-WB development models and commit ourselves to the wealth of development rethinkings that are available to us? Or are they really available to us as possible practices? What are the impediments to translating these alternatives into actual development strategies, plans, and policies?

Thus, this South-South workshop on (re)thinking our development rethinkings. The workshop aims to rethink critical development thinking and inquire into the how and why of its marginal or peripheral location vis a vis the development mainstream rooted in the neoliberal agenda and the neoclassical economic assumptions. The workshop is further organized into four sub-themes that are recurrent to development rethinking: (1) the (ir)relevance of the developmental state, (2) the technologies that promote development as means of dominating the South, (3) the possibility of development without the North, and (4) the political economy of the production and reproduction of poverty.

(Re)thinking development rethinkings:

Rethinking critical perspectives and alternatives in/to development

The workshop’s main theme will evaluate the critical perspectives of development mainstream over the years. The primary question to be answered is: How come mainstream development theory and practice remain unaffected by critiques from inside and outside?

The same question must be asked of development alternatives, whether these are directed towards other ways of thinking about development or doing away entirely with the concept of development. What prevents the adoption or practice of these alternatives?

What underlie development thinking are the assumptions and methods of neoclassical economic theory. And rethinking development is always a going back to development’s fundamental connection to it. The widespread perception that development has failed or is in an impasse, for example, prompted Krugman5 to call for renewing and strengthening its links with neoclassical economics.

Yet these critical efforts remain marginal. The neoliberal agenda and neoclassical economic roots of development thinking continue to hold influence in national developmental strategies, as well as in development interventions supported by the IMF and World Bank.

Pieterse7 offer a different fate to development alternatives. He argues that alternatives can be argued to be successful and points to their adoption and integration into the orthodoxy as evidence. Alternatives such as sustainable development, gender and development, participatory practices, poverty alleviation as development goal, human development, etc. has entered the mainstream of development thinking. Such adoption and co-optation however left us with no viable alternatives and led to a watering down in the politics and the social contexts that necessitated them.

The development impasse then seems to have been overtaken by renewed efforts to re-present mainstream development thinking as the only working and relevant option to developmental problems such as poverty and by the co-optation of alternatives and their integration into the orthodoxy. Sachs’8 recent effort that promises the end of poverty is an example: all we need is to couple the neoliberal agenda with compassion and commitment and we are good to go.

Workshop Sub-Themes

1. Rethinking the developmental state

Current thinking on governance tacitly accepts the narrowing role of the state in directing society. Civil society, thus, have taken on tasks traditionally within the scope of state mandate. This, in addition to the neoliberal claim that development arises from a market largely left alone, contributes to the concept of development exceeding the horizon of state developmental responsibilities. Yet the developmental state is asserted to be still relevant. This comes from both mainstream and marginal development thinking. Two Nobel Prize recipients, for example, highlight the need for state interventions in the market. Sen9 goes against the Pareto principle and advocates some form of wealth reallocation to produced equity in the development of human capabilities. Stiglitz,10 meanwhile, blames the IMF and its rigid structural adjustment conditionalities that erodes state role for the negative experiences of developing countries and their people with globalization. In consideration of the foregoing, the more obvious question is: How is the state relevant in development interventions given its diminishing role, both domestic and global? A more subtle approach to the problem is achieved via the questions: What constitutes our continued belief in the developmental state? What alternatives are available beyond the triad of choices: state, market and civil society?

2. Technologies of development

Offhand, there are at least two meanings that can be derived from this theme: the technologies that make development possible; and the know-how and tools that perpetuate development as means to the domination/determination of the South. Usually the two meanings exist on different planes of the discipline. A goal in this workgroup theme is to juxtapose them and maybe derive something new from their disparity. Questions at their intersection are: How do technologies that support and make possible development maintain the South’s continued domination? How does the South’s dependence on the North, in terms of development know-how and tools, orient its development thinking and its visions of developed selves?

3. Development without/despite the North: South-South cooperation towards development

A reality of development that is deemed normal by its practitioners is the necessary role of the North in the development of the South. This role should either bigger or stronger but never really absent. Rationalizations include restitution, responsibility, charity, etc. It is the North’s obligation, whether dictated by compassion or its guilt, to assume part of the South’s development burden. In practical terms: technology, expertise, financing are things we expect to get from the North’s involvement in our development efforts. The North’s involvement in South development come from the North-South dialogues in the 1970’s and the early1980’s and exemplified in the Brandt Commission. It highlights the necessary linkage between the North and the South in a world economy that is increasingly becoming interdependent. Such conceptualization defuses the more divisive and antagonistic roots of the alternative terms: (semi)periphery and Third World. The concept of periphery lays the blame of the South’s underdevelopment to the North’s development. Third World, meanwhile, originally has the same connotation as the phrase Third Estate in pre-revolutionary France. The point is that what was originally a relation of estrangement and conflict after the postcolonial has been defused into dependence couched as cooperation.  The paramount question then are: What are the effects of South dependence on the North on South-South cooperation for development? Is it possible for the South to pursue development without or despite the North?

4. The political economy of poverty

Development’s supposed final goal is the eradication of poverty. Yet like development, economic emancipation for the world’s poor multitude remains elusive. In real terms, the number of people suffering poverty continues to increase, the condition of their destitution worsening. This occurs with a parallel increase in wealth of the world’s already wealthy. The Pareto optimality principle that underlies neoliberal and neoclassical development thinking all but eliminates the option of redistributing the world’s wealth in favor of the poor. Development that supposedly leaves no individual worse off, thus, is poverty’s holy grail. Yet there is no trickle down effect that should erode poverty as it reaches the bottom poor. What we get is economic growth that leaves more and more people in worse conditions. This leads us to the questions: How come/Why poverty? What are the politics and economics involved in the persistence (maintenance) of poverty? The underlying assumption is that world politics and the global capitalist system seem to be parasitic upon the continued existence of the multitude of poor.

Workshop Schedule

1. Workshop Duration

The workshop timeframe is two days. Participants are advised to arrive on Thursday, the 4^th of October 2007. The workshop proper will take two days. Participants will leave on Sunday.

2. Tentative Schedule

October 4, 2007 Arrival of Participants

7:00 pm Dinner

October 5, 2007 Workshop

8:00 – 9:00 am Registration

9:00 – 10:00 am Welcome Remarks and Preliminaries

10:00 – 12:00 pm Plenary: (Re)thinking Development Rethinkings

(Coffee will be served during Plenary)

12:30 pm Lunch

2:00 – 4:00 pm Session 1: Rethinking the Developmental State

4:30 – 6:30 pm Session 2: Technologies of Development

8:00 pm Dinner and Socials

October 6, 2007 Workshop

9:00 – 11:00 am Session 3: Development without/despite the North:  South-South cooperation towards development

12:00 pm Lunch

2:00 – 4:00 pm Session 4: The Politics Economy of Poverty

4:00 – 6:00 pm Closing Plenary: Concluding Guest Speaker, Closing Remarks and Ceremonies

8:00 pm Dinner and Socials

October 7, 2007 Departure of Participants

¹ Mahoney, James (2003) “Long-Run Development and the Legacy of Colonialism in Spanish America” in American Journal of Sociology, volume 109, 50–106

² Engerman, Stanley and Kenneth Sokoloff (2005) “Colonialism, Inequality and Long-Run Paths of Development,” NBER Working Paper No. W11057

³ Cooke, Bill (2003) “A new continuity with colonial administration: participation in development management” in Third World Quarterly, Volume 24, Issue 1, 47 - 61

⁴ Uma Kothari (2005) “Authority and Expertise: The Professionalisation of International Development and the Ordering of Dissent” in Antipode 37 (3), 425–446.

⁵ Krugman, Paul (1995) Development, Geography and Economic Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

⁶ Schuurman, F. (1993) Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory, London: Zed Books.

⁷ Pieterse, Jan Nederveen (2001) Development Theory: Deconstructions/Reconstructions, London and New Delhi: Sage Publications

⁸ Sachs, Jeffrey (2005) The End of Poverty, New York: Penguin Press.

⁹ Sen, Amartya (2000) Development as Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf

¹⁰ Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2000) Globalization and its Discontents, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company