Development:Theory & Reality

Jakkrit Sangkhamanee, PhD. Department of Sociology & Anthropology

Chulalongkorn University

[1]Mainstreaming Development

Harry S. Truman

Inaugural address, Thursday, January 20, 1949

“we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.

More than half the people of the world are living in

conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas.

For the first time in history, humanity possesses

the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people.”

• While claiming that the "era of development" began at this point, some scholars do not suggest that the concept of development was new

• What was new was to define development in terms of escaping from underdevelopment

• More than half of the world population see themselves as having fallen into the undignified condition of "underdevelopment”

• Development was now a euphemism used to refer to post-war American hegemony

• it was the ideals and development programs of the United States and its (Western) European allies that would form the basis of development everywhere else.

Linear-Stages-of-Growth Models

• W. W. Rostow’s Stages of Growth

• The developing countries could learn a lot from the historical growth experience of the developed countries in transforming their economies from poor agrarian societies to modern industrial ones

• Emphasized the role of accelerated capital accumulation

Rostow’s Stages of Growth

Economic development can be described in terms of a series of steps through which all countries must proceed:

1. The Traditional Society 2. The Pre-conditions for take-off into self-

sustaining growth 3. The Take-off 4. The Drive to Maturity 5. The Age of High Mass Consumption

Rostow’s Model – the 5 Stages of Economic Development

• Advanced nations were considered well beyond the take-off stage while underdeveloped nations were seen as still in the traditional or pre-conditions stages

• Emphasized the need for the mobilization of

domestic and foreign investment in order to accelerate growth

• As a basic assumption, Rostow believes that

countries want to modernize as he describes modernization, and that the society will ascent to the materialistic norms of economic growth

Traditional Societies• Traditional societies are marked by their pre-

Newtonian understanding and use of technology.

• These are societies which have pre-scientific understandings of gadgets, and believe that gods or spirits facilitate the procurement of goods, rather than man and his own ingenuity.

• The norms of economic growth are completely absent from these societies.

Preconditions for Take-off

• The preconditions to take-off are that the society begins committing itself to secular education, that it enables a degree of capital mobilization, especially through the establishment of banks and currency, that an entrepreneurial class form, and that the secular concept of manufacturing develops, with only a few sectors developing at this point

• This leads to a take off in ten to fifty years

The Take-off

• Take-off then occurs when sector-led growth becomes common and society is driven more by economic processes than traditions

• At this point, the norms of economic growth are well established

• Transition from traditional to modern economy

The Drive to Maturity

• The drive to maturity refers to the need for the economy itself to diversify

• The sectors of the economy which lead initially begin to level off, while other sectors begin to take off

• This diversity leads to greatly reduced rates of poverty and rising standards of living, as the society no longer needs to sacrifice its comfort in order to strengthen certain sectors

Age of High Mass Consumption

• The age of high mass consumption refers to the period of contemporary comfort afforded in many western nations, wherein consumers concentrate on durable goods, and hardly remember the subsistence concerns of previous stages

• In the age of high mass consumption, a society is able to choose between concentrating on military and security issues, on equality and welfare issues, or on developing great luxuries for its upper class

• The concept and practice of development is a reflection of Western-Northern hegemony

• in the 1980s, criticisms were raised against ‘one-size-fits-all’ development projects and theory

Criticism

• Strong bias towards western model of liberalism e.g. Marshall Plan (free vs. controlled markets)

• Tries to fit economic progress into a linear system (many countries make false starts)

• It considers mostly large countries: countries with a large population, with natural resources available at just the right time in its history, or with a large land mass

Dependency Theory• A critique to development as growth • Arguing that the roots of underdevelopment can

be found in the connection between external dependence and internal exploitation – not in the lack of capital, technology or modern value

• Focusing on exchange than production • The problem is how third world is integrated into

the global economy • All development is simply the development of

underdevelopment

• Dependency theorists show that the condition of underdevelopment in the Third World is caused by the exploitation by the developed areas

Criticisms of Dependency

• Insensitive to variations within the Third

• Degrees of dependency. It is not black and white

• Belittles the real achievements of the third world (development of underdevelopment or extraverted development)

• What is equal exchange?

[2]Problematizing Development

• According to Truman, modern regime of development is defined not only by economic progress but also technical advances in scientific knowledge

• Science and technical know-how have been used as a political tool in granting the US and Western countries authorities in development

• But why science? And science only? What gives it legitimacy in development practices?

problematizing ‘science’ and ‘nature’

• Science does not operate in a vacuum. Even “science of nature” such as hydrology, botany, ecology or forestry, science is embedded in the society it is produced and implemented

• Science derives many of its variables and questions, as well as its methodology and funding, from wider contemporary social currents

Reframing Science• Scholars of Science Studies starting to change their

minds about the nature and status of Western science

• there are other ways of knowing the world in addition to Eurocentric one

• Radical critiques of science by sociologists of scientific knowledge, feminists, post-colonialists, and socialists

• Argue against ‘Western’ science that uniquely developed in ‘the scientific revolution’ in 17th C and Industrial Revolution of 18-19th C in Europe

• ‘modern science’ was coproduced with industrial capitalism and put forward into international development schemes

• Questioning: what counts as knowledge?

• whether modern science should be seen as setting the epistemological standard in development practices?

• Approaches in History of Science – Imperalist position: – Localist position

The Imperialist position: • Scientific knowledge is uniquely distinguished by its

rationality and methodology • Universal and objective • Methods are experimental, reductionist and empirical • The dominating claim is in its truth and rationality no

matter what its socio-historical origins • Non-Western knowledge can only achieve full status

as knowledge by being absorbed into the Western canon, otherwise it must remain mere tradition or belief

Localist position:

• All knowledge incld. scientific knowledge is value-laden

• Knowledge are ‘situated’, ‘constructed’ within a particular set of values

• Scientific knowledge production is a social activity: historical, contingent and political

• Knowledge (re)production needs people, equipments, institutions, networks, strategies, finance, national ideology = never isolated from social contexts

Historical Look at the Use of Scientific Knowledge In Mekong Development

The Mission of Science and Civilization

in the Mekong region

• French exploration in 1866 from the Mekong delta in Saigon upstream to Yunnan allowed the surveyors to turn the formerly uncharted river onto legible maps

• besides the cartographic survey, the river exploration

was tied to the then popular idea of civilization through scientific advancement

• The French’s Mekong survey was one of the mission

civilisatrice ! the French concept of civilizing mission

‘the mission of exploration was designed to serve at once the interest of science and colonial interests of the first importance’

~ Louise de Carné

• the exploration mission was not only interested in mapping the Mekong from macro scale. Rather, they were interested in studying and recording local hydrological features of the river as they traversed along its turbulent course

• After the mission of civilization by the French exploration team, came the mission of modernization

• Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam became independent

• Flood of international organizations dominantly led by the United States after the World War II

• MRC – Mekong River Commission was established

• ‘The Mekong Committee was born in an era of enormous optimism in science, technology and international development assistance,’ MRC’s website

• United Nations’ Economic Council for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) à Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)

• International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) • International Development Association (IDA) • The United States Agency for International Development

(USAID) • US Operation Mission (USOM), US Bureau of Reclamation,

etc.

• Mekong and its basin-wide tributaries were placed as a main explorative and experimental target to be engineered by modern hydrological knowledge

• Reconnaissance Report: Lower Mekong River Basin, released by the United States Bureau of Reclamation in 1956 pointed to the pressing need in collecting data on hydrology, meteorology, hydrography, topography, sedimentation and geology

• dubbed as Mekong Project, it called for ‘the largest single development project the UN had ever undertaken’

• Many fields of technology and knowledge were employed to act upon the ‘untamed’ river

• These included geological surveys, aerial mapping, hydrological and soil studies, agricultural farm experiments, hydraulic and alluvial channel investigation, the study on fisheries as well as the introduction of mathematical model for river basin simulation

• Amidst political context of Cold War, water resource development was a field whereby foreign aids could be secured and thus international community could legitimately involved

• The United States offered to provide a hydrometric network, establish base levels for surveying, and undertake a hydrographic survey of the main channel, at an estimated cost of more than US$ two million

• Canada and Japan undertook aerial surveys and

mapped the mainstream and major tributaries • Australian government was in charge of geologic

mapping at major dam sites. • France managed to get information from soil and mineral

surveys, and many more countries became involved with technical knowledge in the region

• Despite the ‘modern’ technical knowledge introduced into the region, it was a far cry from saying that the Mekong was a well scientifically planned region

• ‘Due to the political reason, it is essential that the reservoirs

be built in the expansive areas so that the water coverage will be extended closely to the vicinity of communities’

• The Mekong in September 1966 saw a disastrous flood • Though the MC had earlier established a flood forecasting

and warning program, the effective implementation of the system never appeared in realistic terms

• flood in 1966 was the reconfirmation among people involved in hydrological experts of an inevitable role of mega-sized dams

• also, they saw the necessity of creating the regional scientific modelling of overall river topography

• This led to the development of several modelling packages for the past 50 years until now

Modeling the Turbulent Flows

• hydrological techniques and models are concerned with the measurement, correlation and prediction of the river’s water

• Most of the hydrological models developed for Mekong are

based upon the knowledge gained from data of physical approximation and computational understanding of the river

• In 2004, MRC proposed a package called ‘Decision Support

Framework’ (DSF): ‘a powerful analytical tool for understanding the behavior of the river basin and for making planning decisions on how best to manage its water and related natural resources’

Mekong River Commission and its hydrological science

• MRC’s Water Utilization Project: ‘Benchmark Hydrology’

• Decision Support Framework (DSF): ‘a powerful analytical tool for understanding the behavior of the river basin and for making planning decisions on how best to manage its water and related natural resources’

River Classification

Power / Knowledge

Michel Foucault’s

Foucault: How to study Knowledge

“Knowledge is not Truth, but power”

“ The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the children of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power.”

Truth / Discourse

• Societies have “regimes of truth,” which are embodied in discourse, including:

• Special status for certain types of discourse • Criteria for establishing truth and falsehood • Rewards and sanctions • Favored techniques for gaining truth • Establishment of authorities to establish truth

Discourse: Definition

• Discourse is a group of statements which provide a language for talking about a particular topic at a particular historical moment

• Constructed through some discursive practices; • Three major procedures of discursive formation : • Definition & Prohibition à defining statements & rules

about the “sayable” and “thinkable” • Division and rejection; à subject positions; exclusion of

other statements • Opposition between false and true à Authority/Power of

knowledge (Truth)

Discursive Practices

Powers of discourse in development:

• Productive: produce knowledge • Regulative: discipline the subjects and punish or

exclude those who do not follow the rules • Discriminatory: exclude what is not fit within

dominant discourse

Power / knowledge

• Knowledge functions as an instrument of power • “Truth” is subject to economic and political incitement • Knowledge is transmittable through the control of the

dominant political and economical institutions (e.g. academic institutions, military, media, writing)

• The political problem is not changing the minds of people’s thinking, but the production of truth on political, economic and institutionalized levels

• “Truth” is power (but would power be considered as truth?)

Power in Society

Power – pervasive - not just top-down; it circulates, working in multiple

direction and is attached to different authorities e.g. control and regulation of our health • Hospital: spatial arrangement: nursery station à

waiting roomà clinic à examination room • Ideological control: the posters, pamphlets. • Pharmacy, insurance company, etc. • International measures/ Government • School

Feyerabend’s Anything Goes

Paul Feyerabend, physicist-turn-pluralistic philosopher and sociologist of science He developed one of the major opposing models, which is very radical

For him, new theories have little to do with previous theories. Theory and knowledge are incoherent and inconsistent

Against Method

• Feyerabend is against falsification - it would enable any theory to rise, even if it brings many unsolved problems • Lack of consistent methodologies makes it impossible to label inquiries • “scientific” or “non-scientific” • Suggestion: pluralistic methodology for the investigation of knowledge • Many forms of knowledge which were formerly considered as “non-scientific” were later accepted

The development of Scientific knowledge

revolutionary processes (today’s point of view)

linear accumulation of facts (formerly predominant )

Popper Kuhn Feyerabend

non-coherent (too radical for most scientists)

[3]Alternating Development

Context for the rise of alternatives

• The extensive growth of NGOs in numbers and influence working in issues related to development

• Growing environmental concerns has weaken the faith in economic-determinism

• The obvious failures of development projects in many areas of the world

• The challenges to global institutions such as UN, IMF, World Bank for its effectiveness and transparency

• After more than a decade of development, in 1970 Robert McNamara, president of World Bank, recognized that a high rate of growth did not bring satisfactory progress in development = dethronement of GNP

• Social aspect was raised in parallel with economic

• Many problems found: environment degradation, population growth, poverty, hunger, women and children sufferings, shelter, food, employment, migration, unplanned urbanization, etc.

Alternative Development• Many different ways of understanding what it is

• It can be viewed as a critique of mainstream development– following the changes in mainstream thinking

• Adding methodology into or proposing distinctive focuses in development

• It can be viewed as an alternative paradigm– implying a theoretical shift from mainstream

Alternative Development (cont.)

• It can be viewed as concerning local ways of life

• Or it can be viewed as handing over the power in redefine development to agencies outside today’s development authorities

• In short, alternative development shares the same goal but using different means

• The scope and status of alternative development remains unsettled

• “Alternative” can be classified into 3 spheres:

– Agency: state, market, experts, NGOs, people, the poor, women, social institutions, etc.

–Method: participatory, basic needs, endogenous, sustainable, democracy, social movement, multiculturalism, knowledge emancipation, etc.

– Objectives or Values of development: growth, economic distribution, social progress, ecology, human security, freedom from want & fear, etc.

Another Development

• Proposed by Dag Hammerskjold Foundation (1975)

• A combination of basic needs, self-reliance, sustainability, and endogenous development all together

• Each of these proposed ‘jargon’ has its own logic and autonomy

• There is no guarantee that they will blend well together and yield pragmatic outcomes

Endogenous Development

• Promoted by UNESCO (1978), denying the view that development = modernization = westernization

• The goal and value of development are to be created

from within society/culture • There are no forerunners to be followed – unlike

Rostow’s stages of economic growth • Modernization, if desired, is not to import foreign model

but to create one’s own way

Endogenous Development (cont.)

• Instead of ‘global’ as a unit of development, endogenous development introduces different sites where development can be initiated: people, community, local grassroots, etc.

• Taken into account social capitals and cultural identity

of people as a resource of development • Ethno-methodology to knowledge on development

Participatory Development

• Proposed around 1970s as an approach targeting basic needs in development

• Aim at giving the poor a part in initiatives designed for their benefits

• Difference between participation as ‘an end in itself’ and as a ‘process of empowerment’

• Participation is a problematic issue. It is still paternalistic, top-down, unless it is radically turn another way round

Community Culture Development

• Cherish traditional society and its culture as being a resilient unit of development

• Consider state and capitalism as destructive to community resilience

• Peasants’ society is based on Moral Economy with patron-client relations and a source of safety-net

• Often portray static/romantic picture of indigenous people or rural community

Sustainable Development

• Report from the World Commission on Environment and Development, Brundtland Report (1987) pointing out to the limits to growth – ‘our common future’

• development is redefined as to achieve lasting

satisfaction of human needs and improvement of the quality of life without compromising future generation’s capacity to growth

• Cost-effective development-- development should

not degrade environment

Sustainable Development (cont.) • Important issues of environment management

with appropriate technologies • Idea of self-reliant development with natural

resource constraints • But is the aim of sustainable development is for

‘sustaining’ development instead of sustainability • It was also around this time that the idea of

‘post-development’ emerged

Ecofeminism• Adding gender and ecological relations into

development and stir

• From ‘women in development’ (WID) to ‘women, environment and development’ (WED)

• Women are more closely related to nature arguing against male-dominated way of managing nature

• Culture and nature can co-existed

• Women are vulnerable to changes in natural surrounding and hence the most to be effected

Human Development

• UNDP published the first Human Development Report in 1990

• Came up with Human Development Index, a numerical

scale showing life expectancy, adult literacy, GNP per capita, etc.

• Choices of development for each person is already

designated • Ignoring social and political context; what about human

right?

Human Security

• Challenge to the orthodox notion of national security in international relations

• The aim of security is not the nation-state but each individual no matter who and where they are

• Improved and expanded from UNDP initial idea of human development to cover economic, health, food, environment, personal, community and political aspects of human being

• Freedom from want and freedom from fear

What are the differences between the mainstream development and the rest of alternative development?

Economic Growth

versus

Social Transformation

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With all these proposed alternatives in development, are we in the right direction?

Critiques to Alternative Development

• It often simplifies mainstream development as a single, homogenous move toward modernization

• It underestimates the diversity, dynamic, complexity, and adaptability of the mainstream

• There is no clear line of demarcation between main and alternative development – alternative often being adopted into mainstream one

Critiques to Alternative Development (cont.)

• It is difficult to claim that alternative development proposes paradigm shift from mainstream

• It lacks theoretical ground and cohesion; only reactive and reflexive but not refer to one another

• It still reflects certain normative goal and orientation of mainstream development

• It is in flux, not completely developed, and direction still unclear

[4]Imagining Post-development

The rise of Post-development ideas

• Changes in context of knowledge production in 90s

• New trend and fields: post-structuralism, cultural studies, feminist studies, political ecology and the interdisciplinary approach to knowledge

• Leading members of the post-development school argue that development was always unjust, never worked, and has now clearly failed

Edward Said Ivan Illich

Leading critics of post-development• Influenced by Ivan Illich, Edward Said, and other

critics of colonialism and post-colonialism

• Theorists from “Third World” like Arturo Escobar and Gustavo Esteva have challenged the very meaning of development

• The way we understand development is rooted in the earlier colonial discourse that depicts the North as "advanced" and "progressive” and the South as "backward” "degenerate" and "primitive”

Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power

• 17 authors provide explanation of each sector in development enterprise and why it was failed

• Including the issues of environment, equality, helping, participation, planning, science, standard of living, technology, and etc.

• Controversially claim for the end of development era

• Referring to ‘the invention of development’, Estava claims that “On that day, two billion people became underdeveloped…from that time on, they cease being what they were, in all their diversity, and were transmogrified into an inverted mirror of other’s reality”

• According to Wolfgang Sachs, "the idea of

development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape" and "it is time to dismantle this mental structure”

Helena Norberg-Hodge: “the notion of poverty hardly

existed in Ladakh when I visited that country for the first time in 1975. Today it has become part of the language”

• the concept of Global "poverty" is entirely a modern construct

• The idea that we can measure poverty at the level of entire nations and hence label certain countries as "poor" on basis of their GNP is quite new

• While in non-industrial societies, poverty applies to certain individuals and generally does not carry any implications of personal inadequacy, with the advent of modernity, entire nations and continents were led to believe that they were now poor and in need of assistance

Arturo Escobar

Critics of development do not deny the need for change. What they argue is that in order for change to be undertaken properly, it needs to be conceived in different terms

"While social change has probably always been part of the human experience, it was only within the European modernity that 'society', i.e. the whole way of life of a people, was open to empirical analysis and made the subject of planned change.

And while communities in the Third World may find that there is a need for some sort of organized or directed change—in part to reverse the damage done by development—this undoubtedly will not take the form of 'designing life' or social engineering.

In this long run, this means that categories and meanings have to be redefined; through their innovative political practice, new social movements of various kinds are already embarked on this process of redefining the social, and knowledge itself."

Ethnocentrism in Development

• The idea that a middle-class, Western lifestyle may neither be a realistic nor a desirable goal for the majority of the world’s population

• Development is seen as requiring the loss, or indeed the deliberate extermination (ethnocide) of indigenous culture

• As a result, formerly satisfactory ways of life become dissatisfying because development changes people's perception of themselves.

• Development is seen as a set of knowledge, interventions and worldviews (discourses)

• knowledge are also powers—to intervene, transform and to rule—to which post-development critiques challenge the notion of a single path to development

• Demands acknowledgment of diversity of cultural perspectives and priorities

For example:

The politics of defining and satisfying needs is a crucial dimension of development thought, to which the concept of agency is central

But, who voices development concerns, what power relations are played out, how do the interests of development "experts" (the World Bank, IMF officials, and so on) rule the development priorities, and which voices are excluded as a result?

• The post-development approach attempts to overcome this inequality by opening up spaces for non-Western peoples and their concerns

• It is, above all, a critique of the standard assumption about progress as to who possesses the key to it and how it may be implemented

Majid Rahnema

The editor of Post-Development Reader

He admits that it may be true that majority of people whose life has in fact greatly deteriorated do want change. But the answer he suggests is not development but the "end of development”

• Rahnema says that the end of development should not be seen as "an end to the search for new possibilities of change, for a relational world of friendship, or for genuine processes of regeneration able to give birth to new forms of solidarity."

• It should mean that the "inhumane and the ultimately destructive approach to change is over.

• It should resemble a call to the 'good people' everywhere to think and work together."

The proposal of post-development• The possibility of creating discourse and

representations that are not so mediated by the ideology, metaphors, language, etc of development

• The need to change the practices of knowing and doing that defines the development regime

• The need to multiply centers and agencies in knowledge production

• To focus on adaptation, subversion and resistance expressed by people effected by development intervention

Understanding Rural Transformation from Social & Community Movements

Thai political context & the rise of civil society• 1932 the end of Absolute Monarchy • Thailand turned into what so-called

Bureaucratic polity • More than 5 decades after 1932

Thailand’s politics was under influences of military

• After student uprising in October 1973, military has reduced its role in politics

• Black May 1992 military regime was ousted my middle-class based civil society

• Not to mention several Coup d'état

Where and how can Thai civil society developed amidst these fluctuations of

political currents and domination of politics by bureaucracy, politicians and military?

• Number of elections ≠ democratic

progress • The More elections --> the more

reliance on money and patronage system

• Political party’s supporting finds coming largely from illegal activities

• The more elections --> the greater chance of corruption

• The rising roles of businessman in politics

• The booms of national economy led to the coming of new faces of businessman-cum-politicians and former local mafia in national politics

Money Politics

Good Democracy

• Morally right and fair electoral process • Transparent government with check and

balance system • Political rights and the awareness of

citizenship • Strong civil society

Problems of Thai politics

• Electoral cultural politics • Representative democracy: politicians hold

their legitimacy from elections as an absolute rights in administration

• Political activities outside parliament are considered illegitimate

• Members of parliament represent locality but not ethnic identities, diversity of religions, and other cultural entities in a society

What is social movement?And where it is situated in the context of Thai politics?

• civil society – a dominant agency in today’s social movement

• CS is a particular kind of social space which is grown up from citizen in expressing political agenda and conducting political activities in order to change the way governmental power is exercised

• Often seen in the context where citizenship and people’s rights are undermined or not sufficiently protected by authorities

• One of the most obvious examples is the movement about rights (nationality, land ownership, citizenship, democracy, natural resources, gender, beliefs, legal measures)

Traditional approach to social movement

• Religious belief in sin/merit from the past life; nothing can be changed about your faith and destiny in this life (Weber: The Sociology of Religion)

• Peasant’s ideology, belief in millenarianism (holy man) • Holy Man revolt – Against state authority, aimed for socialism based on

commune system – Holy Man will soon arrive and thus all the fertility will follow – To reach that end, villagers needs to have collective

consciousness, strictly practice religious ceremony, and believe in the power of prayer

Community culture movement

• A dominant school of thought among Thai activists during 1970s to 1990s

• Shaped by neo-Marxist thinking such as Chayanov on Russian communitarianism

• Sees state and capitalism as destructive to community resilience

• Peasant as being moral, hence moral economy of the peasants

• Wrote and produced many researches that depict the idealistic picture of rural livelihood

New Social Movements

• Do not rely on parliamentary system in pushing political agenda forward

• Are not interested modernist concerns such as the issues of economic growth and national security

• Struggle not on behalf of/and for class • The movements do not only focus on

particular issue nut rather problematize the whole dominant discourse of development

Grassroots movements

• Survival comes before ideology • Subaltern people are crucial part of the

movement • Weapons of the weak: – Networking among themselves – Ally with NGOs, intellectuals, mass media,

school, temple, and other local institutions – Street protest in city – Expressing their identities and discourses

through ritual and ceremonial conducts – Bring in local knowledge and systems of

plural-legalism

Politics of knowledge

• Knowledge is used as an advocacy tools

• Emphasizing on deconstructed top-down / modernist regime of legitimacy

• Community expertise in managing natural resources

• Villagers’ research ‘Tai Baan’ as counter-hegemonic

• Redefining knowledge is a way to change power relations in development regime

Politics of Media and Representation

• The process of constructing political space can be done anywhere; not limits within formal political structures

• Cultural features are employed as a way of expressing ideas and selves

• Social movements are done both in pragmatic everyday struggle as well as in symbolic terms

• Political struggle is always fluid and integrative; often employ several legitimate authorities for empowerment

Social movement and the change in political culture

• Social movement led to more participation in politics

• Citizen learn about political culture through being part if political campaign and activity

• Strong civil society will reduce the role of mafia and patron-client system

• Social movement is a mechanism in protecting basic rights of those in need

• Allow multiple agencies and agenda to be posed in public awareness and consideration

Political movement and conceptual notes on state and political culture

• NSM questions representative political channel but, unlike Marxist’s class revolution, not attempt to overturn the whole power regime of state

• Change mentality of people from being merely a governed to become a citizen along with other political concepts such as political disobedience, community rights, ethnic identity, morality, and social space

• As NSW and civil society are part of political struggle, they should not be viewed in a romantic, idealistic term

• The crucial question is whether democracy will lead to the growth of civil society or active civil society will make a society more democratic?

The case of Tai Baan (Villagers) Research

as a counter-hegemonic knowledge in development policy and practices

• The past decade in Mekong region saw an emergence and the increasing roles of local researches—packaged under the name Tai Baan—in the politics of river development

• Formed as an advocacy tool to counter the

dominant paradigm of state and regional projects in managing the rivers, the research ‘originated’ from Pak Mun Dam affected people in northeast Thailand

• Later on, the model of villagers’ research has been

widely replicated by many development impacted people in Laos, Vietnam, Burma and Cambodia with strong supports from local NGOs and academics

Local Knowledge as an Advocacy Tool ในฐานะเครื่องมือทางการเมือง

• within political ecology, ‘local knowledge’ has been deployed in redefining peoples’ rights and identity in accordance with alternative development

• Local knowledge is also a part of what so-called new social movement in development regime

But how Tai Baan Research acts to counter dominant paradigm in

water development?

And how it changes power relations among stakeholders in knowledge in development?

Redefining ecological knowledge / discourses in Tai Baan (Villagers) Research

http://www.searin.org

• Tai Baan research propose distinctive set of their own research problems and methodology

• It initially focused on the issue of fisheries but later on included other issues such as plants and vegetation, fishing gears, river bank agriculture as well as other social, economic and cultural issues

• Taken as a whole, Tai Baan researches were used to suggest alternative aspects of river-related knowledge beyond the technicality of scientific hydrology especially to the cases where development projects deemed to threaten local people’s livelihoods

Sacred Practices,

Ceremonies, Festivals,

Architecture, Performing

arts

Contextual Regulations,

morphological classification, community’s

regulatory mechanism, water tools

Adaptive Knowledge : Integration of modern forms of knowledge, Politics of resource

management

Tai Baan Research

Water-based Worldview

Cultural Mechanism

Symbolic Expression

Knowledge Hybridization

Local Ideology, River

cosmology, Myths, Spiritual beliefs, cognitive maps

Worldview & Consciousness

Sociology of Knowledge

Knowledge as Modus Operandi

Cosmology Myths, Folk Narratives Religious teachings

Ritual conducts, the reception of information through mass media, the cooperation with state and

other agencies

Local classification of forest and fishing ground, village group, political networking, application of variety of available knowledge and

tools

• Some scholars and NGOs have argued that it is strategically important to promote the conservationist credentials of local knowledge

• However, there is a real risk that local knowledge become ‘selectively packaged’ so as to exclude what are seen to be discordant elements. What is needed, they propose, is a much more open approach to local knowledge.

The Shortcomings of ‘Local Knowledge’

Practical Politics of Knowledge• State and other actors does not occupy the whole

field of actual power relations • No-one is a total generator of unique form of

knowledge • Knowledge is fractured and always mixed with one

another • On everyday basis, community’s negotiations over

development and natural resource management often employ several kinds of discourses and knowledge (local, governmental, scientific, etc)

Criticisms toward Post-development

• post-development notion is not really beyond, outside or subsequent to development discourse

• post-development theory is merely the latest version of a set of criticisms that have long been evident within writing and thinking about development

• Development has always been about choices, with losers, and winners, dilemmas and destruction as well as creative possibility

• It often times makes over-generalized statement

• Development itself is so varied and carries so many meanings that critiques need to be specific about what they mean when they claim to be "post development”

• Rejecting all development is also seen as rejection of the possibility for material advancement. Or, it is to ignore the tangible transformations in life opportunities and health and material well-being that has been evident in parts of the Third World

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