Development as unfreedom….

Was reading Chris Blattman’s list of books that development people should read but don’t and found this in the Amazon description of “The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho.”

Development, it is generally assumed, is good and necessary, and in its name the West has intervened, implementing all manner of projects in the impoverished regions of the world. When these projects fail, as they do with astonishing regularity, they nonetheless produce a host of regular and unacknowledged effects, including the expansion of bureaucratic state power and the translation of the political realities of poverty and powerlessness into “technical” problems awaiting solution by “development” agencies and experts.

Note that I do not harbor any ill will toward development or even, as a general rule, “technical solutions.” Having been involved with bed net distributions and having watched the outcomes of reproductive health interventions, for example, I can say that there are many positive outcomes of development projects. In my area, fewer kids are dying and women are becoming pregnant a whole lot less, decreasing the risk of maternal mortality.

Disclaimers aside, there is no doubt that development projects often fail for a number of reasons, the first of which is that leaders have no interest in seeing that they succeed. While leaders are indifferent to the outcomes, they happily take on the power that comes with them, embracing bureaucratic reforms, which are mostly just expansions of power at all levels of government.

This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, except that African countries never embraced many of the protections of individual rights which restrict the powers of the state. Independence movements in much of Africa was predicated on an eventual return of power to the majority. Not many (none?) of these movements sought to protect the rights of the minority, much less the individual. Thus, there is little restriction on the types of rules which may be created and since many of these development projects influence policy, development projects unwittingly feed into the autocracy machine.