Georgia White
Counter-practice; Engaging Epistemologies of Struggle Against International Development
Summary
This project works with social movements and partners of social movements to assess the hegemony of International Development, presented as an indisputable truth that limits and suppresses ways of being and producing that lie outside of the western imperial norms of neoliberal modernity.
Embedded in this epistemological hegemony is a tension between theory and practice. Practice in the social domain can often be a way of living out a reality in a manner that asks what is possible. In development, practice is a way of acting out or confirming what has been predetermined as possible or functional, in theory. The development imaginary and its theory, extracts and reconciles what is seen to happen with what it knows to be ‘true’. Because development practice is seen as the enactment of established knowledge and truth, it is only within very strict parameters that the lessons from such enactments might re-enter theory as new knowledge. This truth allows theory to organise the world into its quantifiable attributes in order to quickly assess deficits and deploy rationalised production strategies to address them. This means that the complexity of the world that lies in the connection between economies, cultures, social structures and space are not only homogenised but separated from each other.
This privileging of theory over practice means that other forms of production taking place among social movements and popular organisations can only enter the theoretical canon through an intermediary. The rhetoric of participatory development is an illusion in which the ideologies, strategies and outcomes of projects are predetermined before any groups are able to participate in their detailed implementation.
This project considers the position of the intermediary as the frontier between struggle and development, a position that very often replaces real participation of social groups with representation and mediation by an expert, maintaining a barrier between theory and practice and thereby upholding dominant truths. This position becomes the operating space for activist scholarship and design practice.
Such counter-practice aims to engage the many sides of struggle that happen in the city; silent, spatial, organisational, democratic, material. In doing so it challenges the value system that development operates in and uses to restrict other modes of production. It combines practitioner interviews and development ethnography to identify the hidden political dimensions of organisational structures and the restrictions these can have on practice methodologies and outputs. I combine this with a spatial, epistemological approach to the study of struggle, aiming to create equivalences between claims that uphold the complex differences between sites and demands.
Additional info
The project employs an action research approach, working closely with partners across multiple contexts to develop methodological propositions. It utilises interviews to gather anecdotal evidence of working conditions from both practices and social groups. It also draws on personal experience from the field, working as an independent researcher and within pertinent institutions such as the United Nations.
The history of development has been much contested in the fields of anthropology and ethnography. Post-development has arisen as a theoretical domain that challenges new practices not only to look towards new forms of development but to dispense with the canon of development entirely, claiming that the historical colonial deployment of its core institutions demonstrates a malign political dominance that cannot be disconnected from its ideologies, values or practices. The development imaginary intersects with political economic power to promote a ‘one-world ontology’ (escobar) that privileges western-colonial theory over all other knowledges and practices, promoting a form of modernity that is neoliberal, technocentric, secular and representationally democratic. This singular truth absorbs and assimilates pasts and present into its dominant theories of representation as it moves to limit our imagination of possible futures. This horizon of limited truth impacts all development actors, including social movements, through its control over concepts of value and production. Ultimately, the neoliberal frame of production that development espouses, limits forms of production to their material aspects, ignoring their democratic dimensions.
The neoliberal condition of modernity is increasingly urban, though deindustrialising since the 1980s. Newly forming cities, or newly deindustrialising cities demonstrate the devastating impact of structural adjustment programs on living standards, dispossessing the rural poor through agricultural industrialisation, whilst restricting public spending to recover rising debts. Patterns in these areas demonstrate continued rural to urban migration despite the impoverishment of public services, rising prices, falling wages, diminished opportunities and low infrastructural capacities that cities have to offer to growing populations. Development funds are increasingly channelled through NGOs who are expected to plug the inevitable gaps that form through these economic norms, yet are restricted from challenging the norms themselves. These restrictions link back to constraints on value production that pervade funding criteria across lenders.
The hegemony of truth reflects a new wave of dispossession that manifests spatially, economically, socially and epistemologically, fragmenting the North South divide into a more diffuse pattern of division, reflected in rising rates in interregional inequality alongside existing international inequality. This interregional inequality is increasingly exhibited not only between cities and outlying provinces or between cities of differing economic specialisation, but between the intimate spaces of the city itself, as new forms of enclosure separate and limit access to certain spaces while self-build, unrecognised settlements squeeze between, over and under their enclosed surroundings. These fragmentations form new lines of separation between ontologies and epistemologies that are considered legitimate and those that are not.
A counter-practice to development must use this condition to consider the hegemony of truth as a homogenising force, reducing nuanced differences among micro societies into two poles of opposition; the legitimate and illegitimate. It is in this way that theory is separated from practice in development, just as social democratic claims are separated from their material components. Development does not address acts of struggle, it isolates the material reasons for struggle and deploys practices that have been established as functional in theory, cutting the potential for reciprocal feedback. Opening such reciprocity between theory and practice could legitimise alternative practices and challenge dominant theory as a result.
In counter to the dominant narratives of development, therefore, I propose a combined approach to the study of struggle; not only in terms of material and democratic desires expressed in the organisation and forms of representation used by social organisations, but additionally in respect to the silent struggle of individuals and yet-unorganised groups expressed in the construction and inhabitation of space. These spaces of silent struggle offer the opportunity to recover lost or supressed histories through the exploration of current and future desire and to decipher the tensions between global/local and international/national frontiers that encode the spaces and social divisions of cities as they grow and assimilate into global markets.
In some ways, a counter-work is therefore about making what is incommensurable commensurable. It asks; how can social practice become knowledge? Or, how can practice enter theory, not as a way to enter the development imaginary and change it, but as a way to make commensurable the truths of different experiences in society with this one world ontology that is embedded in multi-level policies; from global institutions, to states, to municipalities.
