Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World

Escobar’s Encountering Development evolves around the thesis that “the discourse and

strategy of development produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and
impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression.” He approaches this through a
discursive analysis of the components and relationships of what he calls “the three axes that
define development”: its forms of knowledge; the system of power that regulates its practice;
and the forms of subjectivity fostered by this discourse (10).

Escobar first tackles the “problematization of poverty” which he contends is a result of the
formulation and solidification of development discourse from the early post-World War II
period to the present. Through a brief historical overview, he illustrates that the
professionalization of development knowledge and the institutionalization of development
practices were the main vehicles for development’s deployment. The post-war economic
arena and the formation of capitalism made systemic pauperization inevitable and “if the
problem was one of insufficient income, the solution was clearly economic growth” (24).
However, Escobar argues, people were left out of the equation. “Development was—and
continues to be for the most part—a top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach” (44).
He draws on two examples, that of development in communities in Nepal and among the
Gapun of Papua New Guinea to show the development encounter and illustrates how
discursive homogenization was the “key to its success as a hegemonic form of
representation” (53).

In the third chapter, Escobar engages in an analysis of the emergence of underdevelopment as

a notion of post-World War II economic development theories. He employs a cultural critique
of economics via the discourse of development economics using what he calls “the
anthropology of modernity” (61). Providing an overview of classical, neoclassical, Keynesian
and growth economic theories, Escobar composes a picture of how the development
discourse grew due to “the fact that a certain historical conjuncture transformed the mode of
existence of economic discourse, thus making possible the elaboration of new objects,
concepts, and methodologies” (84). Drawing on the Gudeman’s and Rivera’s work (1990), he
examines “communities of modellers,” as a method for engaging the dominant economic
discourse. By exploring local and dominant models as conversations, center and periphery
emerge as a perpetual field rather than fixed points, as a place where both models are
accorded a say (98) – a stance that acknowledges “subjects as agents of self-definition whose
practice is shaped by their self-understanding” (101).

Chapters four and five are simply put, about how development works – about the first axis
Escobar lays out in his introduction, forms of knowledge. They demonstrate the way in which
the mechanisms of development function through the systematic production of knowledge
and power in specific fields—such as rural and sustainable development and women and
development.

Chapter four examines the rise and fall of a set of disciplines, or forms of knowledge, in
nutrition, health, and rural development. In this section of the book, Escobar uses institutional
ethnography as a means of understanding the massive development programs established by
World Bank, United Nations, and several universities (Food and Nutrition Policy and
Planning, and the Inter-Agency Project for the Promotion of National Food and Nutrition
Policies, for example). He does this by “investigating how professional training provides the
categories and concepts that dictate the practices of the institution’s members and how local
courses of action are articulated by institutional functions” (109).

Chapter five extends the analysis of chapter four by focusing on the regimes of representation
that underlie constructions of peasants, women, and the environment. Escobar begins with a
discussion about discourse and visuality in which he “follows the displacement of the
development gaze across the terrains in which these three social actors move” (155). He
explores the contradictions and possibilities inherent in the processes of integrated rural
development, incorporating women into development, and sustainable development. Despite
the repeated branching of development into these areas, Escobar argues that “nothing has
really changed at the level of the discourse” (210).

Admitting that the process of unmaking development “is slow and painful” and that “there
are no easy solutions” (217) doesn’t stop Escobar from trying. In chapter six, he imagines a
postdevelopment regime of representation and how to pursue alternative practices in the
context of the social movements in the Third World today. He sees “hybrid cultures” in Latin
America as a mode of cultural affirmation that allows traditional cultures to survive through
their transformative engagement in the face of modernity’s crisis. He doesn’t reach for grand
alternative models or strategies. Instead, he argues for the investigation of alternative
practices and representations in local settings, especially as evidenced in contexts of
hybridization, collective action, and political mobilization.

Escobar’s Encountering Development accomplishes what it sets out to do: creates a dialectic

that examines the discourse of development – one that reveals how development ultimately
created the very problems it was trying to solve. He doesn’t just present the elements, but
looks at “the system of relations established among them” (40). Although written fifteen
years ago, the book is pertinent to today as much of the dominant development discourse
persists unchanged.