Reinventing Development

This chapter focuses upon the question of knowledge—epistemology—to prepare the reader for the arguments in Part II. It draws upon Chaps. 1 and 2 to have a preliminary look at particular beliefs about change and progress that are a part of international development. It starts to treat mainstream development ideas as usefully understood as metaphors, thus linking what are called theories of development to the idea of metaphor. It links this to old idea about knowledge production entailing repeated shifts between induction and deduction, with the former understood in the book as theorisation. It links these to standard international development intervention tools—the log-frame—and argues that nothing is intrinsically wrong with accounts of the world and of social change that are metaphorical and that offer accounts of abstract realities that give meaning to people’s lives in some way or another. But we can readily see how we need to treat such accounts with care if they are offered as guides to action, when that action requires reliable predictability. The book’s basic theoretical position is thus highly conventional, asking what the links between theories and their facts are, and whether these links are predictive. It locates these points in a discussion of ‘heretical Christianities’—‘postdevelopment’, ‘neo-Marxian’ and OXFAM—arguing that all assert that they know what will lead to what. Social acceptability of a variety of beliefs, each of which asserts it is correct, is a familiar characteristic of many societies, including those that I refer to as Christendom (including their secular components). Such societies manage multiple truths, and belief can usefully be thought of as primarily a basis for social organisation and community. Thinking in these terms allows one to envisage different approaches to international development in similar terms and to appreciate their wider context. This starts to point the way forward. Can it be better to believe (in a particular context) in the possibility that no known order exists: that here there is a situation of a ‘knowably unknowable unknown’? In terms of the contemporary (DAC) mainstream, this is to advocate thinking the unthinkable.

This chapter offers foundations for its arguments about the most useful way to understand the sorts of knowledge in play. It examines accounts of how knowledge of development has often been expressed. It argues that what we find is a combination of deliberately abstract accounts with ones that are, in evident contrast, detailed and contingent. I point to the importance of managing and being aware of the difference as an underpinning to exploiting the right to scepticism—to be able to choose between organising as though the context were predictively known and as though it were not. It discusses the ideas of Nisbet and what he has to say about development, cycles, progress and the twin-track habit of understanding change—is it part of a generalised ‘natural history’, a social theory or something specific? This is reinforced by looking at some arguments about ‘non-Western’ modernities and about what has arguably happened to mathematics. The second half of the chapter contrasts Nisbet with ideas about knowledge that are typically associated with natural sciences, drawing upon Crombie. It introduces the powerful and novel idea that prediction is best seen as a choice criterion, requiring that knowledges be compared, where, in Nisbet’s ‘natural histories’ and (as we saw earlier) in International Development, they readily coexist. It shows how use of statistical analysis to support theories empirically is quite different from use of a predictive criterion, whilst arguing that there is nothing objective about how a predictive criterion is actually deployed. It concludes that the theories—development doctrines—that inform the organisational structures that ‘do development’ internationally—aid donors, INGOs and other actors—have various shared characteristics: (1) they are based upon metaphorical accounts of development that have long histories and deep cultural roots, (2) such metaphorical accounts of development appear as social theories, supported by the suspension of disbelief in the inductive phase of classic and long-established views of correct scientific method, yet kept in that phase by the lack of a development, in a deductive phase, of testable predictions, (3) formal empirical methods used to validate such metaphorical accounts include statistical exercises. These permit validation of a theory or its denial, but do not require, as a matter of scientific method, explicit comparison between theories and are so quite different from the development of predictive power, (4) inherited theological influences over these epistemic communities are largely invisible as they are not usually part of their self-reflection, as secular epistemic communities. Doctrines are therefore central to understanding how development is organised and done. When interventions are organised on the belief that cause–effect relations taken from doctrine actually exist and so X will lead to Y, an authority will be needed to determine the truth when such predictive links are found lacking.

The chapter then looks at the conflict between classic and radical social epistemologies. Under such conditions, considerable tensions arguably exist between what important social epistemologies say is the case and what is experienced. The conflict is political, in the sense that mainstream social epistemology, believing in predictively known cause–effect relationships embodied in log-frames, is endorsed by various agencies—donors—whose principals are the elected governments to which they themselves are accountable. Then, it recapitulates the reinvention of development—the conservative and radical responses. The conservative approach, expressed through theories of change, allows asserted predictive knowledge of cause–effect relationships to continue to play a central role in the organisation of development. It allows for horizontal inconsistency, in that different aid projects and other interventions can now more easily have mutually inconsistent cause–effect relationships built into them. But it requires that each intervention has just one such notion. The radical approach addresses directly the possibility that cause–effect relations in social change are not (perhaps for the moment) predictively known. It allows for people to choose to believe this. The chapter discusses how the focus of the book has been upon a case study—contemporary mainstream ways of organising international development interventions—and also on how the industry of official aid works and the social epistemologies embedded in it. These epistemologies, however, are not only concerned with aid work, for they are close to powerful epistemologies relevant to how developed country states engage with social change in their own countries. Since these countries are democracies, this is related to how democratic government happens and how it is understood. In its final conclusions, the chapter makes two points: (1) if predictive power is absent, as is likely, standard methods of accountability are deeply flawed and lack the proper formal foundations they pretend to, (2) if accountability is based upon trust, the old mainstream ways of policy making will flounder, for no narrative will dictate what led to what in terms of inputs and outputs. These two implications are all signs of deep flaws in dominant social epistemologies that must be corrected if we want to move forward. The point is to be effective rather than right. If there is diversity and stubbornly messy complexity, and being right means having predictive capacity, then trying to be right too easily leads to the void. And if you want to win, you may need to be efficient.