Ferguson+pp+1-21(1)

The Anti-Politics Machine "Development,"Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho James Ferguson University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

3 I Introduction The "development"industry in Lesotho Lesotho is a small, land-locked country in Southern Africa, completely surrounded by South Africa (see Figure I.1). The former British protec- torate of Basutoland,Lesotho became independent in 1g66.It has a population of about I.3 million, an area of about 3o,ooo square kilo- meters, and few economically significant natural resources. In 1981/2 the Gross National Product was about Ss86 million. The country is extremely mountainous, and only some ro percent of the land is arable; the rest is suitable only for grazing of livestock. Some gs percent of the population is rural , and most of that is concentrated in the"lowlands,"a narrow crescent of land lying along the western perimeter of the coun- try, conventionally contrasted with the much larger"mountain"zone to the east (see Figure I.2).1 Fields are cropped chiefly in maize, wheat, and sorghum; livestock include cattle, sheep, and goats. The most important source of income for most households, however, is wage labor in South Africa, where perhaps as many as 2 oo,ooo Basotho are employed as migrant laborers( GOL I₉8ʒ,World Bank 198I). In the period I97s-84,this tiny country was receiving"development assistance" from the following bilateral sources:2 Australia Israel Austria Korea Canada Libya Cyprus The Netherlands Denmark Norway Democratic Republic of Germany Saskatchewan (Canada) Federal Republic of Germany Saudi Arabia Finland South Africa Ghana Sweden Korea Switzerland Kuwait Taiwan (R.O.C.) India United Kingdom Iran United States Ireland

6 Introduction In the same period, Lesotho was also receiving assistance from the following international agencies and non- and quasi-governmental organizations:2 AFL-CIO African-American Labor Center Abu Dhabi Fund Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission African Development Bank African Development Fund African Graduate Training (U.S.) Afro-American Institute Agency for Personnel Service Overseas (Ireland) Anglo-American/De Beers Anglo-Collieries Recruiting Organization ofLesotho Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa Australian Development Assistance Agency British Council British Leprosy Mission Brothers ofthe Sacred Heart CARE Catholic ReliefService Christian Aid Commonwealth Development Corporation Commonwealth Fund for Technical Cooperation Credit Union National Association (U.S.) Danish Church Aid Danish Volunteer Service Dental Health International Economic Commission for Africa European Development Fund European Economic Community Food and Agricultural Organization ofthe U.N. Ford Foundation Fund for Research and Investment for the Development ofAfrica German Volunteer Service Goldfields (R.S.A.) IMAP International (U.S.) Institute for Development Management (Canada) International Bank for Reconstruction and Development International Civil Aviation Organization International Cooperative Housing Development Association International Development Association International Extension College Introduction International Labour Organization International Monetary Fund International Potato Production Centre International Telecommunications Union International Trade Centre International Volunteer Service Meals for Millions Foundation (U.S.) Mennonite Central Committee Mine Labour Organization Near East Foundation Netherlands Organization for International Relations OPEC Overseas Development Institute (U.K.) Oxford Committee for Famine Relief(U.K.) Save the Children Fund Seventh-Day Adventist World Service Sisters ofthe Holy Names ofJesus and Mary South African Mohair Board South African Wool Board United Nations Capital Development Fund United Nations Fund for Population Activities United Nations Human Habitat and Settlement Fund U.S. Peace Corps Unitarian Service Committee ofCanada United Methodist Committee on Relief United Nations Children's Emergency Fund United Nations Development Programme United Nations Volunteers Volunteer Development Corporation World Food Programme World Health Organization World Rehabilitation Fund World University Service Reading a list like this, or even walking down the streets of Lesotho's capital city of Maseru amidst the cosmopolitan-swarm of expatriate "experts,"one can hardly help posing the question: what is this all about? What is this massive internationalist intervention, aimed at a country that surely does not appear to be of especially greateconomic or strategic importance? From the mid I97os on,Lesotho has received"a disproportionate volume of a id,"according to one source(Wellings 198y:496),"most of which was disbursed on astonishingly generous

Introduction terms."In I979, Lesotho received some S64 million in "official de- velopment assistance,"according to the World Bank (198I:I64-5), or about $49 for every man, woman, and child in the country-more, that is,(on a per capita basis) than Somalia, Ethiopia, or the Sudan, and more than Chad and Mali put together. The purpose of this aid is ostensibly to alleviate poverty, to increase economic output, and to reduce "depen- dence"on South Africa. Its dispersal has given rise to a substantial "development"industry in Lesotho, employing expatriate consultants and"experts"by the hundreds, and churning out plans,programs, and, most of all, paper, at an astonishing rate.3 " Development assistance" has been used for many things, of course; but a large amount of it has gone into"projects,"especially"rural development projects.” A 1977 official report (FAO I977) listed over 20o rural development schemes in Lesotho; nine of these were large, expensive"area-based"projects focusing on agricultural development. Yet ,if all observers of Lesotho's" development "agree on one thing,it is that "the history of development projects in Lesotho is one of almost unremitting failure to achieve their objectives”(Murray 198I:19). Again and again development projects in Lesotho are launched, and again and again they fail; but no matter how many times this happens there always seems to be someone ready to try again with yet another project.For the"development"industry in Lesotho,"failure"appears to be the norm. There is reason to believe that this situation may not be unique to Lesotho. It is true that Lesotho has a high concentration of "de- velopment assistance," but many other, equally unlikely looking Afri- can countries have concentrations as high or higher than Lesotho's. Through Africa=indeed, through the Third World-one seems to find closely analogous or-even identical "development" institutions, and along with them often a common discourse and the same way of defining " problems ,"a common pool of"experts,"and a common stock of expertise. The "development industry"is apparently a global phenomenon, and there is no reason to think that the "development" intervention in Lesotho, even if an extreme case, is entirely different in kind from similar interventions elsewhere in the world. Even the par- ticular "development"initiatives promoted in Lesotho may only be specific examples of a more general model."Rural development"pro- jects are to be found scattered liberally across the African continent and beyond; and,in nearly every case, these projects seem on inspection to be planned, implemented, and justifed in very nearly the same way as 8 Introduction they are in Lesotho. What is more, these projects seem to " fail " with almost the same astonishing regularity that they do in Lesotho. As Williams(198I:I6-I7) notes,"rural development does not usually achieve its objectives";"By any criteria, successful projects have been the exception rather than the rule." This book will attempt to make a contribution to the understanding of the " development "industry in Lesotho by exploring in detail the conceptualization, planning, and implementation of one"rural de- velopment project,"the Thaba-Tseka Project, funded chiefly by the World Bank and the Canadian International Development Agency ( CIDA ). To the extent that this single project may be seen as part of a larger - indeed, global - apparatus, the study may have some wider relevance in an understanding of what this "development"apparatus is all about, and in providing a concrete demonstration of what is does, how it does it, and why. The literature But, before moving on to present the research findings, it is helpful to make explicit some theoretical points of departure. In doing this, it is useful to begin by considering the scholarly literature on "develop- ment"and"development"agencies, and explaining how this study relates to it. The question of how societies change- or , if one prefers, " develop"-is not really the issue here, and I do not propose to address the enormous literature relating to social and historical transformation; the question here concerns "development" as a social entity in its own right: the set of"development"institutions, agencies, and ideologies peculiar to our own age. The discussion that foliows thus leaves to one side the enormous literature concerned with understanding social trans- formations, and concentrates on the relatively sparse scholarly literature that aims to understand, explain , analyze, or make sense of the" de- velopment”industry itself. The literature on this point is divided, along sharply ideological lines, into two main camps. On the one hand are those who, either as insiders or as sympathetic outsiders, see " development " planning and " de- velopment"agencies as part of a great collective effort to fight poverty, raise standards of living, and promote one or another version of pro- gress . For these writers, of whom a figure like Gunnar Myrdalis perhaps a paradigmatic example , the "development"apparatus is to be 9

Introduction strengthens the powerful. The argument is still organized around the politically naive question :"Do aid programs really help poor people?" Thus attention is paid to what aid projects do, but once again only to show that they "fail,"i.e. that they do not reduce hunger, or to claim that they are"showcase projects," which"distract our attention " from the"overriding functions"of development aid , functions specified only as strategic and imperialistic (Lappe et al. Ig8o:I22). We have, then, an important body of recent literature, and two fundamentally opposed notions of how to interpret the "development" apparatus. Which position will the present study take? This question can perhaps be illuminated by making a comparison with Paul Willis's important book Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Willis's book encounters an enor- mous body of literature, the “education” literature, and finds that literature divisible into two camps based on the authors' attitudes toward the fundamental nature or purpose of the institution"the school."The liberal, from the eighteenth century onward, regards the public school as an instrument for creating an enlightened, egalitarian society, a society with equal opportunity for all. Thus the question in recent times has been how to use and reform schools so that they can help to eradicate the economic, social, and political gaps which separate whites and blacks, workers and middle-class, men and women.7 Against this view has arisen a Marxist critique which argues that, contrary to the claim that schools are either actually or potentially forces for democratic ends, these institutions were established from the very beginning to achieve the opposite. Schools, the Marxists argue, were established by the capitalist state in order to reproduce labor power for an industrial order whose jobs were organized hierarchically. They are not tools for engineering social equality - they are by nature mechanisms for repro- ducing labor power for a class society. This is known as the "reproduc- tion"thesis.8 Willis, for his part, rejects the Liberal argument as politically naive and takes it as a fact that class relations are reproduced under capitalism (working-class kids do get working-class jobs) and that the schools play an important part in this. But he moves beyond"reproduction theory" by refusing to be satisfied with this. Yes, reproduction occurs through (in part)the school, but"for all we are told of how this actually happens, schools may as well be 'black boxes'."This, he observes, is neither theoretically nor politically adequate. Instead, Willis offers a detailed ethnography of what actually happens when the apparatus of schooling I2 Introduction is brought to bear on a group of working - class kids. He finds that there is no mechanistic imprinting of the characteristics required by the capitalist state on its passive victims, as the reproduction theory might suggest, but rather an ongoing battle between school power on the one hand, and resistance based in working-class culture on the other.And it is, ironically, through this resistance that the task of"reproduction"is eventually accomplished. The resistance provoked by schooling is thus an essential part of the explanation for how labor power is reproduced. The school indeed accomplishes the task assigned to it in reproduction theory, but in an unexpected and startling way, a way which underlines the ambiguities of resistance and the scope for choiceand politicalaction in a world that is always structured but never determined. Similarly, when one reads much of the literature on the "develop- ment"industry, one finds oneself doubly dissatisfied=with the liberals, whose only concern seems to be with directing or reforming an insti- tution whose fundamental beneficence they take as given-and with the neo-Marxists, who seem satisfied to establish that the institutions of "development" are part of a fundamentally imperialistic relation be- tween center and periphery and take the matter to be thus settled. But the matter is not settled, any more than the issue of the school is settled by showing that the schools are part of a system of reproduction of labor power. For if , as the neo-Marxists argue, an international development project is to be understood not as a humanitarian attempt to overcome poverty but as an important instrument of imperial and class-based control, then one ought to be interested enough to look and see how this control is effected . One cannot, as Willis rightly notes, expect things to simply snap into place through mysterious"black box" mechanisms simply because Capital"needs"for them to do so. A structure always reproduces itself through a process, and through a struggle; and the sense of a structure, Willis shows, can only be grasped through that sometimes surprising and ironic process, and never by merely labeling the structure with the name of those whose interests it serves. A few recent studies of"rural development"make an important start toward such an understanding of the "development"apparatus by looking at the interventions of "development"agencies not for what they don't do or might do, but for what they do. The edited collection by Heyer, Roberts, and Williams (198r), for instance, is not much interested in the polemics over whether or not "rural development"is really a matter of "helping the poor," or as one formula (Chambers I3

Introduction I₉83) has it,"putting the last first." They quickly dismiss this liberal viey, noting that empirically there "appears to be litle foundation for the assumption that the activities of rural development programmeslead to the improvement of the welfare of the rural population, let alone the ruralpoor”(Heyer et al.I₉8I: Io),Butthis is seen as neither surprising nor especially iluminating; after all, as Keith Griffin remarks in his refreshing preface to the volume,"More often than not,the government has repreented interests other than those of the rural poor and it is hardly surprising, therefore, that public intervention has in practic e been harmful to the majority of the rural people rather than beneficial” (Heyer et al. 198r: vii). For Heyer et al, this is not the main issue; the ta sk is not to denounce the"rural development"establishme ntfor what itisnot,butto analyzeit-notinterms of its own proclamations,butasa social institution in its own right, supported and maintained not by “capitalism”in the abstract, but by historically specifie political and economic interests in each case. This attempt to see "rural develop- ment"interventions as real historical events, susceptible of the same sort of poltical-economic explanation as any others, is found in several recent works in addition to the volume by Heyer, Roberts, and Williams (198r),including Williams(1976,198sa,1986),Beckman(1977), Bern- stein (1977, 1979) and the articles in Galli(1981). It is an important advance to have moved the discussion-on the " development" industry beyond the widespread ideological preoccu- pation withthe question of whether itisto be considereda"good thing" or a" bad thing"a benevolent force to be reformed or an exploitative maneuver to be denounced. Insofar as works in the political economy tradition like Heyer et al.(198I) and Galli(198I) insist that "rural development" is the name for a complex set of institutions and initiat- ives encompassing "multiple, and often contradictory, interests" (Heyer et al.198r: 12),they are in full agreement with the aims of the present work. However,the way in which most of these authors have gone about analyzing the complex reality they have identified as "rural development" is signifcantly different from the approach that wil be taken here. First of all, the political economists are often too quick to impute an economic function to "development" projects, and to accepttheprem- isethat a"development"projectis primarily adevicefor bringing about a.particular sort of economie transformation - a transformation vari- ously glossed as "capitalist penetration,""commoditization,”"capi- talist development,”"the expansion of the capitalist mode of I4 Introduction production,"etc. In this vein, for instance, Beckman (1977:3)claims that rural"development" projects "serve to subject peasants to the imperative of producing for an external market under monopolistic relations of exchange," while Bernstein (1977: 6s) declares as if self- evident that rural"development"projects "operate objectively to in- corporate the peasantry further into commodity relations." It is clear in reading scholarly literature on"development"that the word"development" is used to refer to at least two quite separat e things . On the one hand,"development"is used to mean the process of transition or transformation toward a modern, capitalist, industrial economy- "modernization ,""capitalist development ,"" the develop - ment of the forces of production,"etc. The second meaning, much in vogue from the mid I97os onward, defines itself in terms of"quality of life"and"standard of living,"and refers to the red uction or amelior- ation of poverty and material want . The directionality implied in the word"development" is in this usage no longer historical, but moral . "Development"is no longer a movement in history, but an activity, a social program, a war on poverty on a global scale. Liberals and"de - velopment" bureaucrats regularly conflate these two meanings, im- plicitly equating"modernization"with the elimination or alleviation of poverty. Against this view, the critics insist that the two are different,e. that capitalist development in Africa is very often the cause of poverty and not its cure, and that it is usually not in the interests of the rural poor at all. For the liberal, a rural development project brings"develop- ment,"in one or both of the above senses, and that is all to the good.For the critics discussed above, a rural development project is part of "the expansion of the capitalist mode of production"-“capitalist develop- ment"-which is often not so good at all for the poor"peasants."Class formation, growing inequality and landlessness, decreased self-suff- ciency,and increased poverty are commonly cited results. But the point to be emphasized here is that both the "development"establishment and many of its most articulate critics accept that a rural development project does in fact - for better or worse - bring about some sort of "development," some sort of economic transformation toward a well - defined end point .9 The second major point to be emphasized in the political economy t ype-of approach of the writers under discussion is the extremely important place occupied in their analyses by"interests ."The existence and structure of the"development"industry, and what happens when it is deployed in various different settings, are analyzed by identifying the I5

Introduction concern for the rural poor and so on, is for these writers simply a misrepresentation of what the " development "apparatus is "really" up to. The World Bank may talk a lot about helping poor farmers, for instance, but in fact their funds continue to be targeted at the large, highly capitalized farmers, at the expense of the poor. The much publi- cized"new strategy,"then, is "largely rhetoric," serving only a mysti- fying function(Williams I98r). In the anthropological approach adopted below, the discourse of the "development"establishment is considered much more important than this. It may be that much of this discourse is untrue, but that is no excuse for dismissing it. As Foucault( 197I, I973) has shown, discourse is a practice , it is structured, and it has real effects which are much more profound than -simply "mystification " ． The thoughts and actions of " development"bureaucrats are powerfully shaped by the world of acceptable statements and utterances within which they live; and what they do and do not do is a product- not only of the interests of various nations,classes, orinternational agencies, but also, and at the same time, of a working out of this complex structure of knowledge . Instead of ignoring the orderly field of statements produced by the "development" apparatus on the grounds that the statements are ideological, the study below takes this field as its point of departure for an exploration of the way in which "development"initiatives are produced and put into practice . It should be clear from the above that the approach to be taken to the problem of the "development"industry in Lesotho will be, in keeping with the anthropological approach, "decentered "-that is, it will locate the intelligibility of a series of events and transformations not in the intentions guiding the actions of one or more animating subjects , butin the systematic nature of the social reality which results from those actions. Seeing a"development"project as the simple projection of the “interest”of a subject (the World Bank, Canada, Capital, Imperialism) ignores the non- and counter-intentionality of structural production, and is in this way profoundly non-anthropological. As in the case of Willis's treatment of the schooling apparatus (198I), one must entertain the possibility that the "development" apparatus in Lesotho may do what it does, not at the bidding of some knowing and powerful subiect who is making it all happen , but behind the backs of or against the wills of even the most powerful actors. But this is not to say that such institutions do not represent an exercise of power; only that power is not to be embodied in the person of a" powerful " subject. A“ de- I8 Introduction velopment" project may very well serve power, but in a different way than any ofthe"powerful"actors imagined;it may only wind up,in the end," turning out" to serve power. At this point, the theoretical approach of the present work links up with another important body of literature, closely associated with the work of Foucaul (1979, 198oa, 198ob). Using a decentered conception of power , a number of recent studies (e.g. Foucault 1979 , 198ca, Don- zelot 1979, Pasquino 1978, Procacci I978, Jones and Williamson 1979) have shown how the outcomes ofplanned social interventions can end up coming together into powerful constellations of control that were never intended and in some cases never even recognized, but are all the more effective for being " subieetless." This theoretical innovation makes possible adiferent way of connecting outcomes with power ,one that avoids gwing a cenral place to any acior orentity conceived asa 'powerful" subject. Perhaps the best example of this kind of analysis is Foucault's " gene- alogy" of the prison (1979).The prison,Foucault shows, was created as a“correctional”institution. It was intended to imprint on the inmates the qualities of good citizenship: to make criminals into honest, hard working,law abiding individuals,who could return to a"normal" place in society. This idea of"rehabilitation"was behind the establishment of modern prisons throughout the world, and it continues to be offered as the chief justification for maintaining them and, from time to time, reforming them. Butit is obvious upon inspection;according to Fou. cault, that prisons do not in fact"reform" criminals; that, on the cantrary, they-make nearly impossible that return to"normality"that they have always claimed to produce, and that, instead of eliminating criminality, they seem rather to produce and intensify it within a well defined strata of "delinquents ."While such a result must be con- ccived as a"failure" from the point of view of the planners'intentions, theresult has quite a different character when apprehended as part of a different "strategy."For the constitution of a class of "delinquents," Foucault argues, turned oute to be very useful in taming " popular ilegalities" and transforming the political fact of illegality into the suasi-medical one of pathological delinquency ." By diferentiating ilegalities,and by turning one uniquely wel-supervised and controlled s of violators against the others, the prison did end up serving apart of a system of social control, but in a very different way than its planners had envisioned . "If this is the case," Foucault writes: I9

2I 20 Introduction the prison, apparently "failing", does not miss its target ; on the contrary, it reaches it, in so far as it gives rise to one particular form of illegality in the midst of others, which it is able to isolate, to place in full light and to organize as a relatively enclosed, but penetrable, milieu... For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous-and, on occasion, usable -form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in producing the delinquent as a pathologized subject ... So successful has the prison been that, after a century and a half of 'failures', the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispense with it. (Foucault 1979:276-7) The point to be taken from the above argument is only that planned interventions may produce unintended outcomes that end up, all the same, incorporated into anonymous constellations of control-author- less"strategies,"in Foucault's sense (1979, I98ob)-that turn out in the end to have a kind of politicalintelligibility. This is only another way of approaching the problem noted by Willis (198I)in his discussion of the school cited above: the most important political effects of a planned intervention may occur unconsciously, behind the backs or against the wills of the "planners" who may seem to be running the show. This will turn out to be one of the key problems raised by the operation ofthe"development"apparatus in Lesotho, and the approach that is adopted owes much to the literature so briefly discussed above. The complex relation between the intentionality of planning and the strategic intelligibility of outcomes is perhaps the single most important theme winding through the pages that follow.As this theme appears and reappears in the chapters below, one cardinal principle will beillustrated again and again: intentional plans are always important, but never in quite the way the planners imagined. In the pages that follow, I will try to show how, in the case of a development project in Lesotho, in- tentional plans interacted with unacknowledged structures and chance events to produce unintended outcomes which turn out to be intelligible not only as the unforeseen effects of an intendedintervention, but also as the unlikely instruments of an unplotted strategy. Specifically, the remaining chapters will show how outcomes that at first appear as mere "side effects" of an unsuccessful attempt to engineer an economic Introduction transformation become legible in another perspective as unintended yet instrumental elements in a resultant constellation that has the effect of expanding the exercise of a particular sort of state power while simul- taneously exerting a powerful depoliticizing effect.itis this unauthored resultant constellation that I call "theanti-politicsmachine , " for reasons that I hope will in the end become clear. The remaining chapters aim to explore how such an unlikely "machine" works, and to understand better what it does.