Why, and How, We Must Contest ‘Development’

Sometimes we assume that people everywhere want the same thing. We project our versions of a ‘good’ life onto the lives of others who surely, like us, aspire to a certain status, wealth, well-being, or set of worldly possessions. These egocentric tendencies underlie how the discourse and practice of ‘development’ became synonymous with the ‘one-size-fits-all’ pursuit of modernization – a Western-centric recipe for ‘progress’, the key ingredients being industrialization, capital investment, technological advancement, and institutional development.

The temptation to homogenize human wants and needs aren’t just a naïve mental tic but a harmful fallacy. It leads us too quickly to assume that development is everywhere desired, and desirable, when in reality there are always winners and losers. And when the Western project of ‘development’ promotes universal endpoints, it denies the myriad ways in which colonial injustices ensured that there could never be a level playing field for countries to reach them, even if they wanted to.

But what is development for, then, if it isn’t ours – or even someone else’s – pursuit of the good life?

The answer, of course, is that there can never be one answer. But this isn’t just another (typical) academic cop out. More deliberately, the answer actually lies within this somewhat unsatisfactory, non-answer. In practice, development is fundamentally about contesting different answers to this question of what is good, or bad, about the way social life is organized.

People answer differently because of the inevitable diversity of wants, needs, and preferences of individuals, groups and nations, each with divergent identities, lived experiences, mindsets and worldviews. Development can only happen by confronting, negotiating, and (more or less fairly) reconciling these differences. It is, in the real world, the unavoidable process of contesting alternative desired futures.

This is the core claim we advance in our new book, The Politics of Development, where we unpack the what, where, why, and how of this ubiquitous process of contestation. Drawing on a range of lived experiences from around the world, we shine a light on how it underlies progress in tackling some of the most intractable challenges we face – including poverty, inequality, exclusion, the climate crisis and protracted conflict.

But what does the process of contesting alternative desired futures look like, in practice? And why is contestation a better starting point for studying and researching development than ‘everyone wants the same thing’?

The short answer is that it encourages a more grounded analysis. It enables us to do justice to the diversity of desired futures while studying them through a common comparative lens. Examining the contours of contestation in situ can reveal what ‘development’ means locally (if it has any meaning at all) and, crucially, who decides. It allows us to reveal how historical legacies of colonial injustice have (re)-produced the gap between people’s lived realities and desired futures.

Rather than reducing the study of development to a narrow focus on end goals, studying contestation also urges us to interpret development outcomes as products of unequal power relations. Because contestation, like power, is universal, it does not confine us geographically to outdated binaries between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds.

Rather, contestation is possible everywhere and anywhere there are alternative desired futures. It isn’t contained to what we might consider ‘traditional’ political decision-making arenas like global summits, legislative assemblies, town councils or village gatherings. It is alive, habitual even, in the micropolitics of everyday life: on street corners and shantytowns, where goods and services are traded for political favors, in the digital sphere, where (un)popular opinion can become a hashtag phenomenon, or in homes, where everyday decisions affect the opportunities and freedoms people have to exercise agency over their own life choices.

A sharper focus on contestation brings us closer to these active and often catalytic sites of development. But we need new tools to evaluate what goes on inside them. In our book, The Politics of Development, we deploy the three ‘I’s framework – of institutions, interests and ideas – to help uncover the inner workings of contestation.

We show that anywhere alternative desired futures are being contested, there are:

• Institutions, or formal and informal rules, norms and customs
• Being contested by more (or less) rational actors with competing interests
• Holding a range of ideas about what is right and fair. 

The analytical props may seem deceptively simple, but they offer a window to complexity. They motivate why people choose to challenge or accept the status quo. They are how people contest it. And ultimately, they become the outcomes of this process of contestation. In other words, institutions, interests and ideas are the ends of means of contestation.  

This is why understanding contestation matters. It is, ultimately, the process that determines whose version of a desired future becomes lived reality. And we must study it regardless of our own pre-conceptions about what that future should look like.