The new horizons of development

My previous article on these pages (‘The paradox of participation’, Sept 1) generated a polemical debate on social media about the validity, relevance and effectiveness of participatory approaches of social development.

There was a series of emails from development practitioners, academics and researchers that appreciated and criticised my views. They appreciated my efforts to present a critique and revive the critical debate of participatory development and criticised me for being a bit anachronistic. Some critics even termed it my eurocentrism. I think both camps of readers made some valid observations to take forward a critical debate of social development.

As far as being ‘eurocentric’ is concerned, we must concede to the fact that all mainstream development discourses, as we know them today, were primarily evolved from the notion of the civil society in the West. The received or borrowed notion of participatory development today reminds us of the intellectual assertion of Edward W Said on how Western scholarship looks at the non-Western world. In his magnum opus, ‘Orientalism’, Said has provided a new lens to consider the production of knowledge, culture and anthropology. To him, all hitherto scholarship of the modern West has been embedded with the colonial experience and a collective sense of cultural superiority over the non-West.

This scholarship in part – though inadvertently – provided the intellectual rationale for colonialism. Postcolonial societies, with an unreconstructed relationship of dependence with the West, could not evolve an independent worldview of development. The non-Western discourses of culture, development and anthropology remained at the margin of mainstream discourses. Post-colonial theorists, like the Subaltern Studies Group in India, could not make major intellectual breakthroughs to counter the so-called ‘hegemonic’ development discourses of the West.

The postcolonial critical theory propounded by the Subaltern Studies Group needs to be mainstreamed in our development policy discourse. This is not happening in Pakistan at least and most of the development practitioners don’t have a clue about this postcolonial critical theory of development.

Colonialism resulted in an historical rupture in the evolution of the indigenous civil society in countries like Pakistan. The late professor Hamza Alavi provided a strong thesis of how the indigenous development process in the then Indian Subcontinent was impeded due to the imperialistic exploitation of the resources by the British Empire. These intellectual expositions are important contributions towards evolving an indigenous theory of social development in postcolonial developing countries like Pakistan.

Nonetheless, we can find a vast amount of critical research on the essence of participatory development, its effectiveness, strengths and limitations. This critical research puts forth a range of new perspectives on development that are more econometric and technical than the conventional approaches of participatory development. According to the critics, these approaches are primarily influenced by the neoliberal doctrine of transforming civil society spaces of collective expression into individualistic ventures. Arguably, the new perspectives put forth by the critics of eurocentrism rely on the taxonomy of development knowledge that is produced in the West rather than formulating a non-Western counter-narrative.

For instance, one of the leading perspectives is that of social entrepreneurship, which purports to look at development as a process that facilitates, incubates and inculcates business attitudes through the social lens. It claims to promote a triple bottom-line of economically sustainable, socially accountable and environmentally-responsible development. This perspective also focuses on innovations and the optimal use of technology to improve access to essential goods and services. It also gives primacy to technology and cutting-edge entrepreneurial approaches in that a participant is an actor of value addition rather than a co-planner of local development.

From this perspective, the process of identifying participatory needs without their articulation into a pragmatic and sustainable development programme will be a time-consuming and inefficient exercise. When viewed from this perspective, participatory development is all about demand articulation and a way of bridging the gap between the supply and demand of public goods and services.

Like participatory development, this approach does not seem to address the asymmetry of the worldview, power and knowledge between the agency and the recipient, which is the most critical aspects of transformative development. Instead, it tends to formalise the asymmetry and gives birth to new asymmetries between the self-selected local entrepreneurs and the community as a whole.

In one of my articles that was published in these pages (‘Moving beyond the jargon’, May 18), I provided a critical analysis of social entrepreneurship. In this context, it would suffice to say that social entrepreneurship requires business acumen, an enabling policy environment, well-established value chains, mature markets and protected investment venues for a start-up to flourish into a social enterprise. Social entrepreurship can be one of the tools of economic empowerment in the absence of monopolistic capitalism, extractive economic production and a protectionist state.

There is another perspective that is more inclusive than the social entrepreurship approach, which advocates local engagement as a process of empowerment rather a nominal participation in a predefined project. This perspective claims to draw upon past learning and aims to create a critical mass that think holistically and creatively on how to enhance access to improved services – both in the immediate and long term. It begins by encouraging participants to redefine the development needs where men, women and marginalised groups have the knowledge, skills and capabilities to live a healthy, balanced and connected life that leads to positive socio-economic development.

This perspective encourages communities to realistically map their social development needs with the support of locally-developed technical experts. This approach strives to ensure that the demand for services is articulated for all – including women, children, people with disabilities, people who are transgender and the aged. This approach can provide a vital breakthrough in development policy and practice if translated into a framework of social development that goes beyond Euroscepticism.

By being non-prescriptive, this framework tends to allow the communities to think flexibly about how they can increase and improve access (supply) in both the short and long terms. This can be done through a realistic assessment of the larger ecosystem and, more specifically, through the government, the private sector and self-help initiatives. The framework encourages communities to crowdsource relevant resources (and technical organisations) and initiate public-private partnerships. Central to this framework is the idea of partnership in knowledge, technique, planning and the execution of transformational development.

Pakistan is at the cusp of rapid changes accentuated by CPEC and its corollary: extractive economic activity, environmental degradation and the political repercussions of an emerging new great game. The participation of citizens in the development process is of utmost importance to reap the real benefits of CPEC. The government must encourage the engagement of citizens through an open dialogue on the pros and cons of CPEC, with an inclusive development policy to accommodate alternative voices.

The civil society must also come forward with cutting-edge development perspectives to broaden the horizons of public policy for people-centric development. Within the civil society, we must also promote a culture of critical self-assessment to learn from failures, improve and build on the successes. The civil society must learn quickly to adapt to new political realities and adopt creative strategies to have a larger impact on transformational development.

Development practitioners must come forward as knowledge leaders with compassion and empathy to assert that a better world is possible for the poorer sections of our country. This must ensure the meaningful and real participation of the poor in identifying, designing and executing the development. This involves going beyond project-oriented development approaches, rural development dogmatism and shunning the notions of technical superiority. If this happens, Pakistan will witness a new era of transformative social development.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.