Why is development work so straight?

Abstract

I attempt to show that the development paradigm used to frame social and economic public interventions delivers a modernist conception of the family, the economy, and the private-public divide that is at odds both with fundamental social dynamics, and with the ethic of liberation it claims. Policies and interventions conceive of society as a structure of interlocked institutions and rules, thus cornering individuals within policed essences, meaning and functions. I develop the point that despite these normative assumptions, development practice opens spaces of identities, such as sexualities, where individuals articulate difference, dissidence, rights, and reshape dominant moralities and conception of society with regards to diversity and integration. My experience as agriculture and environment specialist for the Zimbabwean Government is then used to illustrate this analysis. 1-Development : constructing the individual within institutions Why do we work in the development sector ? How do we justify this involvement ? We stress the unbearable poverty and suffering of billions of individuals, the unacceptable cornering of all wealth by the happy few, the flouting of justice and rights, the selfishness of the powerful, the oppression of the majority, of women, of children, the ravages of curable diseases, the plundering of nature. To address these horrors of our times, we claim value systems and legitimate better futures, and draw paths to reach them. As our daily work gets saturated with the technicalities of defining and following these paths, the values we use become more implicit. I make the general statement that our approaches of development are based on conceiving the individual as element of institutions, thus only giving a person rights, motivation, and agency within the limits of an imagined functional identity inside the institutions we target. Development practice becomes this two tiered narration, where an institution is targeted as vehicle of change (the equalitarian family, the dynamic informal sector, the environmentally concerned village assembly, etc.) and succeeds as such because individuals perform the corresponding expected functional identities (the economically independent and educated woman with new rights, the initially poor entrepreneurial borrower-investor-producer-salesperson, the farmer who protects the nearby forest because he believes his children will need its resources, etc.). Because it claims to reach better futures through the construction or reform of specific institutions, development theory and practice fantasises ad hoc, corresponding, perfectly functional identities and directs its effort on making them exist. This is quite obvious when looking at how development programmes are evaluated. Achieving an institution's development purpose is narrated as the result of individuals performing functional identities within the objectives of the institutions, and is linked to