Reflecting Upon the Past? Development Studies’ Ambivalent Relation to History

Abstract

It has often been pointed out that development policy takes little notice of the history of development. Given the pressures under which policymakers have to operate, this is perhaps not altogether surprising. Occasionally, however, it is also suggested that Development Studies as a discipline also lacks a thorough-going appreciation of history. In view of the importance of historical perspective for any policy-relevant field, this claim deserves scrutiny. As a first step toward illuminating this issue, the article considers the ways in which development history is addressed in introductory textbooks used at British universities. It indicates that, with a few exceptions, texts’ discussion of history is generally weak in several respects. By contrast, the research literature in Development Studies is blessed with a large number of historically well-informed works. The defects of the textbooks, therefore, cannot be attributed to a dearth of appropriate source material. Instead, it would appear that textbook authors are failing to draw upon the research literature. In concluding, the article explores the possibility that Development Studies, like other policy-relevant disciplines in the social sciences, may be characterized by distinct knowledge traditions which operate largely in isolation from one another.

Keywords

Development Studies history teaching introductory courses textbooks

The claim that development interventions often fail is a commonplace in the literature. One reason sometimes given for such failure is that development policy has generally ignored past experience, that it has taken little interest in its own history (e.g., Porter et al., 1991; Williams, 1987: 433). As a result, policy frequently reinvents the wheel. Despite endless injunctions of the need to ‘learn the lessons’ of the past (e.g., USAID, 2010: 33), there is abundant evidence that policymakers have in fact paid little attention to the outcomes of past development programmes (e.g., Broad, 2007; Lewis, 2009). To be sure, some development agencies have established ‘evaluation divisions’ to assess the success or failure of their programmes, but doubt has been expressed whether such institutions have much influence on policy (e.g., van den Berg and Quarles van Ufford, 2005). During the 1990s, the World Bank used ‘learning from experience’ to justify its policy prescriptions, but according to one study, in reality this largely amounted to a ‘highly partial presentation of country-level evidence to support an already theoretically or ideologically derived position’ (King and McGrath, 2004: 202–03, cf. 151).

Assuming that this criticism is well- founded, it constitutes quite a serious indictment. For in all areas of policy, examining issues from a historical perspective offers what might be seen as ‘tactical’ as well as ‘strategic’ advantages. Among the former it is obviously important to learn from the record of past interventions. All too often approaches which have previously failed are reintroduced (cf. Ferguson, 1994) or those which were previously successful have been forgotten (Harwood, 2012). Reflecting upon the longer term, however, is also of strategic value in that thinking historically offers an escape from what the historian David Cannadine has called ‘the tyranny of present-day opinion’. Thus, looking at the past helps one to recognize the unstated assumptions underlying current policy. For example, Karl Polanyi’s classic analysis of economic development in Europe since the 18th century, The Great Transformation, has been used in numerous studies of development in the global South. Similarly, more recent historical analyses (e.g., by Alice Amsden or Ha-Joon Chang) have cast doubt upon widely held assumptions about the appropriate roles for public and private sectors in development policy. To ignore the past, therefore, comes at a cost.

But where precisely does the problem lie? That donor agencies pay little attention to history is perhaps not surprising, given the pressures upon their staff to disburse funds quickly, oversee the implementation of programmes, or act in accord with politicians’ priorities (e.g., Harremoes et al., 2001: 168ff). But one might also ask whether the development professionals who work in these agencies are adequately equipped to think about policy-formulation from a historical perspective. And that brings us to the subject of this article: Development Studies as a discipline. To what extent does this field treat the emergence of development concepts and institutions since 1945 as the result of a longer-standing historical process? From time-to-time various authors have voiced unease with the discipline’s alleged neglect of history, but their concerns have generally been raised in passing rather than addressed head-on.¹ And despite countless discussions since the 1980s of ‘the crisis’ within Development Studies, the issue of the discipline’s historical sensibility has yet to receive any sustained attention.² Given how much is at stake, it seems worth returning to this issue.

A systematic attempt to answer this question would be a tall order, requiring a wide-ranging study of the Development Studies literature, its teaching programmes, its research projects, its conferences and its academic staff. I can hardly undertake that here, but it may nonetheless be useful to take a modest step in this direction by looking at one limited aspect of the way in which the subject is taught. The analysis which follows is based upon textbooks and readers (published between 1995 and 2012) which have recently been used in introductory courses at British universities.³ Relying upon textbooks, of course, can provide only a partial view of the overall teaching process since we still need to know how these books are actually used in introductory courses.

Bearing these caveats in mind, what the analysis below shows is that while virtually all of these texts declare that historical perspective is important in thinking about development issues, remarkably few of them actually manage to demonstrate that fact. Moreover, this weakness is particularly striking in view of the fact that the research literature in Development Studies includes numerous historically well-informed works. For the most part, therefore, it appears that introductory teaching in the discipline is failing to draw upon relevant research. In the conclusion, I consider possible explanations for this gulf.

I. Development History’s Place in Textbooks

At the outset, it is important to recognize that Development Studies textbooks are not all of a piece. They vary in the extent to which they incorporate historical perspective, and a few are very good.⁴ One of the best is Potter et al. (2008). Its introductory chapter points out that the idea of ‘development’ in fact dates from the Enlightenment while the concept of ‘trusteeship’ served to justify late 19th century European colonial ambitions. The second chapter is devoted to colonialism, not only outlining the history of colonialism, but drawing attention to its continuing impact upon the economies as well as administrative and educational systems of many developing countries today. Equally good is Payne and Phillips’ (2009) political economy of development thinking. In contrast with most textbooks, it does not merely outline the various traditions of development thought since 1945 but accounts for their emergence since, the authors argue, the meaning of ‘development’ is always historically conditioned (Payne and Phillips, 2009: 179–80). Thus, they demonstrate how these traditions were shaped by historically specific political and economic processes: from the debates surrounding 18th century industrialization, to the late 19th century challenge facing the ‘catch-up’ nations, the Cold War from 1945, the emergence of the East Asian ‘tiger economies’ from the 1960s and the rise of China and India from the 1990s.

Most introductory texts, however, do not measure up to this standard. This failure is particularly striking in view of the fact that Development Studies enjoys an abundance of historically informed monographs (e.g., by Colin Leys, Amiya Bagchi, Amartya Sen, Gavin Kitching, Amanda Kay McVety or Atul Kohli) as well as several excellent edited collections. The textbooks’ historical weakness, therefore, can hardly be ascribed to a dearth of suitable source material.

The texts’ limitations are of several kinds. One common misconception is to treat ‘development’—as a concept and an undertaking—as emerging only from the 1940s. In so doing, these books ignore work which has clearly identified much earlier origins, such as the importance of 18th- and 19th-century European debates over the nature of economic and social development (Cowen and Shenton, 1996) or the problems faced by 19th century European ‘catch-up countries’ (Senghaas, 1985).

The opening paragraph of AA (2007)⁵, for example, declares that ‘Development has come a long way in the past six decades. As both an enterprise and a scholarly discipline, development became significant in the period immediately following World War Two’ (AA, 2007: 1). Accordingly, 19th-century debates over European development find no place in this account. The same applies to BB (2008). Though the text aims to present a ‘chronological and conceptual approach’ to development (BB, 2008: vi), the chapter devoted to the history of development opens with the statement that ‘the history of development in the developing world began soon after the Second World War’ (BB, 2008: 19; similarly, CC (2012) and DD (2012)).

A second weakness common to several texts is that, despite devoting space to historical issues, authors nonetheless fail to demonstrate the relevance of history for current development questions. This is a problem, for example, in EE (2008), an edited collection sometimes used in introductory courses. Promising ‘an overview of the major issues that have a bearing on development theory and practice’ (EE, 2008: xiii), the first three essays in Part 2 discuss 18th and 19th century writings which the authors claim are relevant to current development debate. While these essays do draw upon excellent work, none of them succeeds in showing how 18th-century development concepts remain relevant today (the same can be said for FF (2011)).

Among the historical topics which are arguably essential in an introductory text is colonialism. Without some familiarity with this period, students are unlikely to grasp the significance of various issues in the world of post-1945 development: for example, the origins of development institutions, projects and expertise; dependency theory, comparative advantage and ‘structural adjustment’; or what is novel (and what is not) about ‘globalization’. It is, therefore, much to be welcomed that several texts dedicate space to a discussion of colonialism. Disappointing, nonetheless, is that few of them manage to use this history to illuminate subsequent development issues.

DD (2012), for example, opens with the promising statement that development ‘had its origins in the colonial era’, thereafter becoming ‘formalised as a project’ in the mid-20th century (DD, 2012: 2, 4). In its actual discussion of the colonial era, however, the book glides all too quickly over the well-established fact that during the late-colonial period unmistakably ‘developmentalist’ policies—intended to ameliorate the social and political damage wreaked by colonization—were introduced in several colonies (e.g., Cowen and Shenton, 1996).

GG (2012), an edited collection recommended on some undergraduate courses, is similar in this respect. On the one hand, the volume includes an excellent historically informed survey of development theories and devotes an additional chapter to imperialism and colonialism. The latter provides a wide-ranging account of colonial history at the end of which it poses important questions for students to consider (e.g., to identify parallels between colonial conditions and those that prevail in the global South today). But students will look in vain for answers in this chapter, finding instead only a few vague and unsupported statements: for example, ‘The field of development…still bears some remnants of its origin in the colonial era’ and the colonial development efforts of the 1940s ‘powerfully shaped Africa for the future’ (GG, 2012: 40).

II. Conclusion

The findings reported above are relatively straightforward. Despite a declaration by virtually all authors that historical perspective is important in understanding development, most introductory textbooks fail to provide this. It is too soon, of course, to conclude on the basis of these results that teaching in Development Studies is weak on historical perspective, for much remains to be clarified. Do teaching staff routinely compensate for the weakness of texts through providing additional more historically informed materials? Is this weakness limited to introductory courses, or is it also common in advanced courses? Are these findings peculiar to Anglophone textbooks or are they more widespread?

Even if this weakness turns out to be characteristic of teaching as a whole, however, the more interesting result of this survey is an apparent paradox: that this failing seems not to extend to the research literature. Nevertheless, historical research in the discipline appears to have had remarkably little impact upon the textbooks. Just why this should be is too large a question to pursue here, but one or two hypotheses are worth outlining. One possibility is that what looks like a ‘paradox’ might be merely the result of the differences between undergraduate and doctoral training. In his reflections on the Development Studies curriculum, for example, Michael Woolcock (2007) has argued that undergraduate and masters students in the field need to be qualified for entry-level jobs in the development industry which require a set of skills which are quite distinct from those required for senior positions (e.g., as consultants in government, NGOs and international agencies or as academics). While the latter are usually trained at doctoral level and are responsible for formulating policy, the former are charged with implementing it. Since Woolcock’s analysis of curricula is pitched at a very general level—saying nothing about specific topics or concepts which deserve a place in introductory courses—it says nothing about the role of history in the curriculum nor does it account for the contrast between teaching and research literatures. Nevertheless, his attention to the distinct requirements of entry-level and senior positions suggests that the nature of the job-market might shed light upon the contrast between these literatures.⁶

In any event, there are indications that this contrast may be shaped by factors other than the nature of the employment market. As Michael Burawoy (2004) has observed, many of those disciplines in the humanities and social sciences which have implications for policy embrace multiple forms of knowledge. ‘Instrumental’ knowledge, he argues, is intended to prepare students for subsequent employment as professionals (in the domain to which the discipline is relevant) while ‘reflexive’ knowledge examines critically the processes on which the discipline focuses as well as the discipline’s own basic assumptions.⁷ And this latter form of knowledge arises as an autonomously generated form of knowledge common to all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, whether policy-relevant or not. It would be worth exploring, therefore, whether the contrast between introductory texts and the research literature in Development Studies is but a special case of the more general knowledge traditions which Burawoy has called ‘instrumental’ and ‘reflexive’.

Even if this proves to be the case, however, it still leaves the ‘paradox’ unexplained: Why does the instrumentalist tradition in Development Studies textbooks appear to be largely unaffected by the reflexive one? In principle, one might attempt to treat this as a psychological phenomenon whereby individual academics vary in their intellectual predilections and are thus more inclined towards one form of knowledge than the other. I would guess, however, that we will better understand the unhistorical character of most introductory texts if we approach them, not as disembodied works produced by individual authors in isolation, but as forms of knowledge which have been shaped by particular social contexts.

The existing literature indicates a few issues where this approach might prove fruitful, such as the discussion of the contrasting ways in which ‘development’ has been conceived. Drawing upon Cowen and Shenton (1996), various authors have called attention to the fact that ‘development’ is used in the literature to refer both to the intention underlying intervention programmes as well as to a historical social process (e.g., Thomas, 2000; Hart, 2001). Hart uses the distinction in analysing the political economy of debates over development and globalization, while Thomas challenges what he sees as an unfortunate shift in the dominant meaning of ‘development’ in the late 20th century debates: away from social process and toward intention. Although neither author has used this distinction to view Development Studies through a sociological lens, one wonders whether those scholars who routinely use ‘development’ to mean intention and those who use it to mean social process may in fact be expressing the quite different analytical interests of two ‘schools’ within the discipline.

But if reflexive and instrumentalist knowledge are associated with particular locations within a socially structured discipline, what kinds of location should we be looking for, and how might they foster/shape/sustain a particular form of knowledge? Although the literature has occasionally referred in passing to schools or similar groups within the discipline (e.g., Kothari, 2005: 3–7), the phenomenon has attracted surprisingly little analytical attention.⁸ Let me, therefore, sketch a few possibilities.

It has occasionally been suggested, for example, that some departments of Development Studies can be roughly categorized as predominantly instrumentalist or reflexive in orientation (Bernstein, 2007: 24). If so, one might explore whether a department’s orientation bears some relation to its sources of funding and/or to its structural situation within the university. On the other hand, in Britain at least, scholars working on development issues are employed in several kinds of institutions. Some work in multi-disciplinary departments of Development Studies while others work in single-subject departments of economics, geography, anthropology, and so on. Bernstein has speculated that one consequence of this might be that theoretical innovation and ‘critical work’ are more likely to come out of the latter kind of institution rather than the former (Bernstein, 2007: 17).

Alternatively, if there are cases where departments embrace both forms of knowledge, it would be important to look at the relationship between these knowledges. In Burawoy’s analysis, instrumentalist and reflexive knowledges are portrayed as complementary in nature, thus mutually fruitful, and some anthropologists have taken a similar view (e.g., Gardner and Lewis, 2015). While that may be true in principle, however, what Burawoy and like-minded authors seem to have overlooked is that in practice the two communities in question may either be in conflict with one another or, more commonly, may function largely in isolation from one another.⁹ And it is this relationship of distance or antagonism which may offer a way to understand the ‘paradox’ in Development Studies.

Some evidence suggests an agonistic relationship. John Harriss, for example, has written of ‘radical’ and ‘orthodox’ scholars within the discipline who came into conflict at some universities during the 1970s and 1980s (Harriss, 2005: 23–4). Although Henry Bernstein does not refer to ‘schools’, ‘camps’, or ‘factions’, his thesis—that Development Studies underwent a major shift of intellectual orientation since its emergence—also points in this direction. During the 1950s and 1960s, he argues, the new field was characterized by a ‘great tradition’ rooted in political economy which was able to ask ‘big questions about development and to pursue big ideas in seeking to answer them…’ (Bernstein, 2006: 53; cf. Payne, 2004: 2). But with the rise of the neo-liberal consensus since the 1980s, he writes, most members of the field have taken the view that ‘its principal rationale as “policy science” was to find ways of assisting state-led development’ (Bernstein, 2006: 54; cf. Apthorpe and Krahl, 1986: 251). And this shift has affected the ‘organisation and fortunes of the academy’ (Bernstein, 2006: 57), reducing the ‘room for manoeuvre’ of those scholars critical of the consensus (Bernstein, 2005: 120–21, 134). In his view, the older tradition still exists, albeit with diminished influence.¹⁰

There are, however, quite different ways in which sociological explanation might be deployed. One could, for example, treat the reflexive and instrumentalist traditions as intellectual resources, each of which an individual scholar might draw upon, depending on the circumstances (e.g., when writing an introductory textbook versus writing a research paper). In this case, it is the expectations of the author’s audience which would shape the choice of tradition.¹¹

Deciding which of these various interpretations better captures the state of the discipline will obviously require further study. Several years ago, Bernstein expressed the hope that his own reflections upon the long-term intellectual shift within the discipline might contribute towards a ‘historical and critical sociology of knowledge of Development Studies’ (Bernstein, 2005: 111). It seems to me that a project of that kind is still necessary if we are to understand the paradoxical nature of the discipline’s relation to history.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article could not have been researched without the support of Jeremy Kent Hall (Director, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex). I was able to complete the article while a Visiting Scholar at the Max-Planck-Institute for History of Science (Berlin), thanks to the support of Dagmar Schaefer (co-director of the Institute). Conversations over the last few years with my colleague, Stephen Biggs, have helped me to clarify my thoughts on this problem, and I thank R. L. Stirrat and Ralph Grillo for helpful discussion of some of the issues. I am also very grateful to both Andrew Bowman and Catherine Locke for useful feedback on an earlier draft.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article

Notes

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