Dossier, Volume 13 #5: Development Upside-Down

A Development Worker's Second Thoughts

In the early 1970s, Iran became a centre of attention for the newly emerging development world. The country had just come out of a political crisis, the most promising aspect of which was the nationalization of the oil industries. Unprecedentedly huge sums of money had thus become available to meet its most ambitious claim: to become a fully developed nation by the twenty-first century. At the end of a visit to the country, the United Nations undersecretary for economic affairs pronounced Iran an exemplary case of successful development and expressed his belief that it would soon become the second Japan of Asia.

Many things were actually developing fast in Iran, but they came in in pairs: production and repression, riches and destitution, education and exclusion, nationhood and dependency, urban development and the destruction of community life, recognition on the international scene and divorce between the ruler and the ruled at the national level. Despite the contradictions, the country's GNP was developing at a record rate of 12 to 15 per cent a year!

In 1971, together with a group of young believers in "another development," I suggested to the then-prime minister that he give us one of the thousand eggs that the government had put into the development basket, with a view to "hatching" it in a different way.

A lifelong commitment to the causes of progress and development, including four years as Iran's minister of science and higher education, had left me with a bitter feeling of failure. The earlier dreams of a whole generation seemed to drift away, no longer fit to respond to the realities from which they had emerged. Development, as I had struggled for it at both the academic and UN levels, was only serving the modern crusaders living off the new development business. They had succeeded in mobilizing large quantities of money and goodwill for their campaigns. Yet all that had only helped create a mushrooming of new varieties of induced needs, without providing the "target populations" with the "resources" required even to meet their old needs.

Many of us still believed in development as the only way to help the poor emerge from their deprivation as "a flower from the bud." We wanted to try out something else: to replace the concept of economic growth with a type of bottom-up, participatory, integrated and endogenous development. It was agreed that no plan of action would be prepared before we had listened to the people for as long as it would prove necessary. Our proposal was accepted.

Alashtar was the little town that gave birth to this experiment. The town is located in Luristan, then a rather abandoned semiagricultural, seminomadic region of western Iran, well known in the Louvre and other great museums for the remarkable bronze artifacts it produced a millennium ago. Yet neither this fame nor the tremendously rich agricultural potential of the area had been of any help in sparing its population the difficulties and suffering they were facing.

Our team stayed there for six to seven years, just before the great political upheavals in Iran. The last time I was in Alashtar, the village people were overwhelmingly kind, giving me the feeling that we had done much for them. In a "participatory" and "cost-effective" way, we had helped them build hundreds of small roads and bridges and initiate new agricultural schemes and quite original experiments in such areas as schooling, primary health care, housing and women's emancipation.

Yet as I look back, often with nostalgia, I see it in a different light. I still believe the experience brought the villages in the Alashtar area many changes, including a whole set of things they had badly wanted. But those very changes have left me with unresolved questions. Whom, and what type of society, did they ultimately serve? Did people get what they actually needed for their blossoming? Or did they ultimately see us as only a disturbing parenthesis in their lives?

A poignant image continues to haunt me. It is the beautiful face of a woman from Peresk who, at the very end of a documentary made on the Alashtar project, gives her own description of what a desirable community could be: "I would want our village to become a place where my household and children would be happy and living amongst happy and prosperous neighbours. For whenever the neighbours are happy and well, everyone else is also happy and well." For her, as for most of the peasants and nomads of the region, "towse-'e" (the formal translation of "development") meant whatever they had learned to expect from our presence. At best, it represented the material comfort and consumer goods associated with our mode of living. It was quite different from their dream of âbâdî: a prosperous and convivial village where water and food are abundant and neighbours are happy and caring.

In the six years that followed, while I continued to heed my dharma as a developer, this time working for UNDP in Mali, the image of this inspired woman followed me everywhere and prompted me to see things in terms of this basic question: had the kind of development we were proud to deliver anything to do with âbâdî and the convivial prosperity dreamed of by the young mother from Peresk, or was it nothing but another version of the same "towse-'e" that acted as a defoliant of their cultures, made them dependent on sources beyond their control, and ultimately changed them into becoming strangers towards each other?

The certainties shared by the Alashtar Team were typical of the worldview held by most "left-wing" developers of the sixties. Although they challenged

the official positions of the development establishment, at both the international and national levels, they nonetheless had many points in common with that establishment.

The first was absolute faith in "progress," as we had learned to dream of it through years of schooling and contacts with the West. This belief entailed the following certainties:

Scientific and material progress had made it possible, for the first time in history, to build a suffering-free new world, able to meet everyone's needs and aspirations.

The main obstacle to such a goal was "underdevelopment," a consequence of social and cultural anemia and long exposure to feudal and colonial domination and outdated modes of life.

The obstacle could be and had to be removed through professionally designed modern management and intervention.

We, the "educated," were called on by history to take up the challenge and to save, forever, our fellow human beings from the scourge of underdevelopment.

The difference between us and the development establishment was that we did not share its vision of reality, which in our view reduced all cultural and social phenomena to their economic dimension. We believed instead in the primacy of factors that had given exceptional strength to the so-called underdeveloped countries: their social ties, human solidarities and complex immune systems. We agreed nonetheless that the colossal task of regenerating people's spaces had to reckon with the reality of economic development.

Similarly, we all held that many things had indeed gone wrong in the modernization and industrialization of "developed" societies. But not all of us agreed with the Gandhian position that industrialism represented a satanic project. For many of us, new social models could easily be imagined where economic affluence could eventually be combined with social justice. Endogenous and participatory development was one of them.

The above certainties gave the generation to which I belong an exceptional force that led us to realize many unprecedented achievements, mostly technical and organizational ones. Yet the same certainties were also instrumental in misleading both ourselves and others, in particular those who trusted our knowledge and judgement. Because of our fear of questioning our certainties, they prevented us not only from seeing the world as it actually was but also from trusting our own genuine experience of the truth. A self-centered interpretation of the Freirian "pedagogy of the oppressed" had caused us to believe that, thanks to our "progressive" ideas, we were in a position to "conscientize" others and help them complete their journey from their "semitransitive" or "naïve transitive" consciousness to "critical consciousness."

It took us a long and bitter time to fully realize how the basic assumption of a continuous evolution of societies from "underdeveloped" to "developed" was questionable. We, the so-called educated elites, had accepted the myth because our minds had been the first to be colonized. We had assessed the vitality and relevance of all cultures, including our own, solely from the perspective of the winners. We were ready to defend the authentic, the high and the noble values still present in the so-called underdeveloped cultures, but we had come to share the view that they were ultimately the losers.

On another plane, the economistic bias had prompted us to focus our attention almost exclusively on the more tangible consequences of imperialism, in particular the economic gap between the "developed" and the "underdeveloped" world. It took us more time to understand how pervasive cultural destruction had been in the disruption of vernacular societies--including the disruption of their economic vitality.

We still hadn't noticed the most pernicious aspect of development ideology. HIV, the AIDS virus, is said to hone in on the helper T cell, the master coordinator of the immune system, with a view to replacing the cell's gene codes with its own. In the same way, the invader called development had set out to penetrate the perceptual space of its target populations with a view to instilling in them its own concept of change.

Highly sophisticated programs were engineered to impute to the "underdeveloped" the same "needs" and "lacks" that defined a "normal" person in an industrialized society. Experts prepared prefabricated packages to meet those needs, and proposed them as the only acceptable substitute to what different cultures had previously evolved to meet similar needs.

Thus, Nestlé powdered milk became the response to mothers' need for feeding their babies. The washing machine, the refrigerator, chemical fertilizers, cars, hospitals and schooling became the best and often the only acceptable substitutes for cleanliness, food preservation, agricultural improvement, transport, health care and learning. Not only people's preferences and aspirations but also their sense of what was possible was systematically shaped by standards set by the development invaders. The colonized were being engineered to serve as their own colonizers.

We, the "educated elites," became the new agents for this kind of change. The best of us competed with one another to give a human face to development practices that were ultimately destined to prove the ontological inferiority of our neighbours' cultures. We engaged them on a kind of development highway where the latecomers, with old cars and no money to run or service them, were to race against forerunners who were not only driving their turbojet cars at top speed but also controlling both the car industry and the highway rules.

The irony of the situation was that in so doing we perceived ourselves as "conscientizers," raising people's critical awareness. No wonder the gap we had once thought to fill increased at an exponential rate.

The obsessive race to "catch up" with the most advanced countries has reduced the complex search for a just, prosperous and more humane society to a simplistic choice between different brands of the same economistic and uniformizing plans. As such, it has produced a sad atrophy of social imagination and creativity.

The search for new ways to regenerate human spaces and define a simple life in the context of modernity goes on at all levels, and in all the regions of the world. And contrary to some propaganda, such movements do not necessarily go back to medieval or archaic times or prevent people from sharing the advantages offered by the otherwise stupendous achievements of science and technology. They only refuse to accept that the currently increasing patterns of exclusion, dehumanization and loss of autonomy are the price to be paid for a better life. What the victims of progress expect from everyone are, above all, genuine expressions of friendship and solidarity, rather than development. To this end, the following tracks could be more fully explored.

1. The search for a new language of friendship. A new language is indeed necessary to bring together all those interested in establishing ties of genuine friendship and solidarity. It will be a language totally different from professionally created plastic words such as "development." The search for the new language (or languages) implies that real, living words whose roots are still nourished by people's cultures be learned, carefully understood and regenerated.

2. The search for a redefinition of concepts and goals. The lack of a holistic perception has reduced the possibilities of what could be done to achieve gabbina (the Oromo word for "radiance of a well-fed and carefree person") into the patchwork of projects and relief operations that have dominated the development scene in the last fifty years. The recovery of languages and words, which could eventually help us understand the Boran idea of "beneficial flow of life," will make it easier to redefine our goals and concepts in a holistic context.

3. The search for new types of interactions and solidarities. "Power" is no longer what it was, and where it seemed to be. Alliances and solidarities have also taken new forms. The excluded people of the Third World have become closer allies with the millions of the "new poor" in America and Europe than with their own governments or economically privileged classes. Governments all over the world, together with the economic, military and scientific institutions related to them, now constitute a class of their own, opposed to the populations whom they are supposed to represent.

4. New spirituality. A spiritual dimension has emerged out of the arts of resistance to subjugation that requires a much more attentive reading. "Fundamentalist" mass movements, through which a certain interpretation of religion and spirituality has enabled a new breed of unscrupulous politicians and professional "revolutionaries" to achieve their own ends, have received worldwide attention. Much can be learned from such movements, even when they twist their followers' sense of the spiritual and the sacred into new forms of mass slavery. However, what is of more interest to the search for new forms of coaction in friendship and solidarity is social activists' growing awareness of the inner world. The concept of "small is beautiful" is prompting more people to perceive themselves as seeds that can be fertilized only if they are themselves in good condition.

The post-development era will be different. Its exact shape will depend on the lessons learned on these exploratory tracks.