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North and South Divide Development Learning
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Crossing Borders: development,
learning and the North – South divide
COLIN MCFARLANE
ABSTRACT While the validity of categories like ‘First’ and ‘Third’ World or ‘North’ and ‘South’ has been increasingly questioned, there have been few attempts to consider how learning between North and South might be conceived. Drawing on a range of perspectives from development and postcolonial scholarship, this paper argues for the creative possibility of learning between different contexts. This involves a conceptualisation of learning that is at once ethical and indirect: ethical because it transcends a liberal integration of subaltern knowledge, and indirect because it transcends a rationalist tendency to limit learning to direct knowledge transfer between places perceived as ‘similar’. This challenge requires a consistent interrogation of the epistemic and institutional basis and implications of the North – South divide, and an insistence on developing progressive conceptions of learning.
Across the social sciences it remains routinely common to find references to ‘the global South’, the ‘Third World’ and even the ‘periphery’. We are by now familiar with the arguments against such forms of categorisation, many of which have been spelled out in this journal (see, for instance, Berger, 1994; 2004; Dirlik, 2004; Kamrava, 1995; Korany, 1994). They ask, for instance, whether we can reasonably group Argentina, Botswana and Iran in the same category of countries, when their political, cultural and economic circum- stances are so significantly different. And when patterns of poverty and wealth vary so greatly even within countries, can it make any sense to split the world into ‘First’ and ‘Third’, ‘North’ and ‘South’? Others ask why, given that it is increasingly accepted that contemporary challenges of ‘development’—such as de-industrialisation, regionalisation, flexibilisation, migration, urban deprivation, economic structural change, market failure, state restructuring, concerns with social capital and social exclusion, among other issues (Pieterse, 2001; Maxwell, 1998)—are common to ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ countries, we should choose to restrict development debates to either ‘set’ of countries. Ultimately, categorisation is an endless pursuit. As Maxwell (1998: 25) has put it:
Take any pair of societies or countries, identify some differences between them, isolate those which belong to the poorer country, and call this the true territory
Colin McFarlane is in the Department of Geography, Durham University, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK. Email: colin@durham.ac.
Third World Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 8, pp 1413 – 1437, 2006
ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/06/081413–25 Ó 2006 Third World Quarterly DOI: 10/01436590601027271 1413
of development. But we could do this with Britain and Belgium, as easily as we could with Britain and Belize; and anyway, the characteristics change over time. Does the game bring us any closer to a ‘true’ definition of a developing country? I fear not.
To be sure, these categories have their political merit. They have been used to mobilise collectives of low-income countries on issues as diverse as the non- aligned movement, labour rights, trade and tariffs, and the environment (Dirlik, 2004). Writing about Africa, Ferguson (2006: 33) has argued:
For all their manifold failings, the developmental narratives that have long dominated thinking about Africa’s place-in-the-world—narratives that expli- citly rank countries from high to low, from more to less ‘developed’—do at least acknowledge (and promise to remedy) the grievances of political – economic inequality and low global status in relation to other places.
For all that, they have also been acutely fractured categories. Witness, for instance, the divisive oil politics of OPEC. And with the ‘war on terror’ shaping the contemporary geopolitical horizon, we might detect the emergence of a conservative neo-Third Worldism that shelters state violence in countries including Indonesia or India, and that retains little of the progressive collectivist politics of the 1950s and 1960s (Hadiz, 2004). If, as political labels, these categories are problematic, it is also the case that different forms of global solidarity are emerging. Indeed, Olesen (2004), using the example of the Zapatistas and pointing to other social movements (see, for instance, Keck & Sikkink, 1998), suggests, somewhat hopefully, that modes of global solidarity are shifting from the one-sided solidarity of Third Worldism, through which there was a clear distinction between the (state) providers and beneficiaries of solidarity, to a globalised solidarity based on mutuality. This sort of problematising is not, of course, to deny that global inequality in economic and political spheres is increasing (Ferguson, 2006; Rapley, 2001; Ould-Mey, 2003), or to deny the simple fact that, as a short-hand, it makes perfect sense to refer to a growing divergence between ‘rich’ countries and ‘poor’ countries. It does force us to ask, however, as a diversity of recent commentators has done, whether intellectually terms like ‘South’ or ‘Third World’ do any work. The use of these categories often seems to achieve little more than to ‘fix’ a country as immobile and static, to tie a country into a relation of equivalence between a set of problems and a category. The implications of doing so are being increasingly documented in a variety of fields in the social sciences. For instance, in urban studies, Robinson (2002; 2005) argues that Euro- American constructs like the ‘global city’ or ‘world city’ theses negate the ordinary, contingent geographies of contemporary cities. In these constructs the city is positioned in a hierarchy through which it is measured against, say, transnational business or finance networks in ways that obscure other aspects of city-life in those cities, ‘especially dynamic economic activities, popular
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countries to learn from one another. If Appadurai (2000), Ferguson (2006) and Robinson (2002) are concerned principally with the need to rethink areas and categories, in this paper I am concerned with how learning might occur across a North – South divide. Inevitably this requires a degree of critical reflection on what labels like North and South do. If agents working on issues as diverse as urban development, welfare provision or conflict resolution wish to draw on examples from different places, it is generally countries considered ‘like-minded’ or that share similar values that are invoked. This extends beyond the academy to realms such as policy making. In the case of the UK, for instance, policy makers appear almost instinctively to look to countries such as Canada, New Zealand and particularly the USA when attempting to draw lessons about policy. These are countries where, as the political scientist Richard Rose (1991) has argued, policy makers perceive ‘common values’ (for example of a capitalist democracy or of a similar culture) to be constant: ‘Elected officials searching for lessons prefer to turn to those whose overall political values are consistent with their own’ (Rose, 1991: 17; 1993). This makes it unlikely for policy makers interested in, say, EU expansion or federalism to think to look not just to the example of the USA but perhaps also to that of India, where the federal settlement has had to negotiate linguistic, cultural and religious differences. Attempting to learn only from the ‘usual suspects’, such as the USA in relation to EU expansion, does not necessarily diminish the quality of policies, but it does necessarily negate a range of experience across the globe that could prove useful. This entrenches a narrow range of ideas based around particular policy networks, as Dolowitz and Marsh (1996: 353) put it.
If policy makers are looking to draw lessons from politics which are similar in institutional, economic and cultural makeup, it might be argued that, instead of expanding the number of ideas and actors involved in the decision making process, policy transfer enhances the power of a relatively small circle of actors who consistently draw lessons from each other.
So how might learning be conceived across a North – South divide? While the relations between knowledge, learning and development are of growing importance in development (see the special issue of Development in Practice, 2002; DFID, 2000; Hovland, 2003; K. King, 2001; McFarlane, 2006a; Parnwell, 1999; Wilson, 2002; World Bank, 1999), there have few attempts to explore how learning between North and South might be conceived. Much of the literature concerned with development and learning has explored learning in the context of South – South rather than South – North (exceptions here include Gaventa, 1999; de Haan & Maxwell, 1998; Slater, 1997). In this paper I want to argue in favour of the possibilities of learning in the field of development between development scholars and practitioners working in ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ countries. This requires a conception of learning that must be critically reflexive of the power relations between different groups, and that must be able to imagine the possibilities of learning between different
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contexts in ways that do not conform to historical patterns of colonisation or to contemporary tendencies of aid-based conditionality. I am not simply suggesting here that categories like ‘global South’ are solely responsible for a lack of engagement by, for instance, Euro-American scholars working in ‘Western’ contexts with the literatures and knowledges of Africa, Asia and South America, nor that struggling to abandon such categories will necessarily result in some kind of neutral engagement or dialogue. I do not claim that categories should be abandoned, as if that were possible, but join with a range of recent commentators who have argued in favour of new ways of conceiving ‘areas’ like Africa (see Ferguson, 2006) or, on a different register, the South. I am arguing for a particular conception of learning between different contexts that might help pluralise the production of knowledge and lead to a more globally informed social science—towards an image of what Spivak (2003) has called ‘planetarity’, or what we might refer to as a more postcolonial social science. I will argue against a conception of learning that reflects a liberal understanding of dialogue, or that invokes difference only through an imperative towards homogeneity, undermining the opportunities for learning from different places and for a more informed debate about development. This is an argument, then, for learning from different places in ways that does not seek to pre-empt what those different places might offer. Running through this discussion is a commitment to learning as a processual, provisional and uncertain ethico-politics. This is not to underestimate the explicit and implicit hierarchies that frame conceptions and relations between different places. To invoke difference is not to naively suggest that, say, Accra, London, Mumbai and Washington suddenly occupy a horizontally equal space. People within and outside these disparate spaces often conceive of a world hierarchically ranked. As Ferguson (2006) has argued, social scientists may rightly speak of coeval ‘alternative modernities’ (see Gaonkar, 2001; Geschiere, 1997; Harootunian, 2000; Holston, 1999) in Africa or elsewhere, but there is a need to be attentive to how people living in, for example, sub-Saharan Africa, may conceive of Africa as inferior, as a continent at the bottom rank of global society, and may wish to escape to a perceived ‘better life’ in Europe or America. Hierarchical constructs cannot be straightforwardly argued away. In addition, it would be foolish to pretend that all scholars are necessarily interested in learning from different places. That said, my suggestion is that scholars who may well be interested in this kind of engagement tend not to engage. This is in part because of a lack of critical reflection both on the epistemological and institutional biases that divide (in this case) development scholarship in the North and South and on the possibilities that engagement might involve. The paper will progress by contextualising division in development debates in relation to a wider imperative to separate North and South in the Euro- American social sciences. It will argue that the failure to communicate around development is part of a more general tendency to differentiate between the ‘here’ and ‘there’. I will suggest that this is more than just habit or routine: it is bound up with an implicit tendency to view the South as a mix
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write the following unsettling words about the sub-discipline and its relationship to the wider discipline:
Within Departments of Geography there are those with knowledge and expertise associated mainly with Geographies of the ‘North’ on the one hand, and the so-called developmentalists, or those interested in the ‘South’, on the other. Whilst there may be in-house links and individual exceptions, I would still maintain that each is compartmentalized, often dismissive or even apathetic to the other; or, as is often the case with development geographers, for good reasons, very defensive of ‘their’ marginalized terrain. This failure to communicate within our own departments, not only prevents valuable learning from either context, it also reflects the pedestrianism of academic discourse in comparison to actual processes and practices on the ground (Jones, 2000: 238).
This failure to communicate around development is part of a more general tendency to differentiate between the ‘here’ and ‘there’ in the social sciences, and is more than just habit or routine. I would suggest that it remains bound up with an implicit tendency to view the South as a mix of countries where knowledge travels to rather than from, and it is underwritten by the organisation of knowledge production in the Euro-American academy. For instance, writing about political geography, but with an argument that is applicable more widely in the social sciences, Robinson (2003b) describes hegemonic zones of academic knowledge production that preclude more plural, internationalised forms of knowledge creation. She has argued that the material basis of this is a knowledge-production industrial complex (KPIC), through which disparate geographies of publishers, markets, citation indices and Euro-American theoretical preoccupations reflect and maintain the centrality and privilege of particular academic locations. This geography of knowledge production may appear obvious, but in practice there is an often implicit tension between parochial and universalist epistemic claims or assumptions that can act to mask some of the realities of the discipline’s situatedness. Robinson argues (2003b: 648):
For through the KPIC, parochial knowledge is created in universal form. Western feminist scholarship becomes ‘feminist geography’, and theories of a few western states produce ‘political geographies of the state’. My hunch is that even the most general level of intellectual work within the discipline, ie dominant theorisations of space and place, are also produced in a western idiom, learning little from different traditions of scholarship and diverse political contexts.
The ‘first here, then elsewhere’ tendency is both epistemological and institutional, and is currently troubling a variety of (particularly) inter- nationally oriented disciplines (see, eg, Mufti, 2005; Spivak, 2003 on Comparative Literature). It extends too to theoretical fields of endeavour, including the recent upsurge of interest in imperialism. For example, rallying on Hardt and Negri’s (2000) Empire, Mufti (2005: 488) is disturbed to find ‘the diverse regions and societies of the world’ reduced to an ‘undifferentiated field’ for the elaboration of a universalist Euro-American logic of capitalist
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development (emphasis in original). As Mufti indicates, Hardt and Negri may have had more sensitivity to the role of the particular and the subaltern in imperialism if they had engaged with the significant reworking of Marxism and imperialism by the subaltern studies collective (Guha & Spivak, 1998; Chakrabarty, 2002). The embedding of Euro-US-centric forms of knowledge production in the institutional make-up of the contemporary social sciences betrays what Appadurai (2000) has called a ‘weak internationalisation’. By weak inter- nationalisation Appadurai is referring to the implicit tendency to insist that the only kinds of knowledge that can be taken seriously by the Euro-American academy are those that conform to its particular formats of writing, citation and history. This relates to the operation of established communities of judgement and accountability which insist on a privileged role for a particular community of experts who precede and follow any specific piece of research. In addition, there is in many specialisms a need for the author to ‘detach morality and political interest from properly scholarly research’ (Appadurai, 2000: 14; Brohman, 1996; McGee, 1995; Parnwell, 1999). This raises a question that Appadurai (2000: 14) believes has not been sufficiently answered in US Area Studies: ‘Can we find ways to legitimately engage scholarship by public intellec- tuals here and overseas whose work is not primarily conditioned by professional criteria of criticism and dissemination?’. This involves moving beyond the assumption that overseas scholarship can only be taken seriously if it conforms to Euro-American precepts, and developing others ways of imagining the internationalisation of social science research. Interrogating the tendencies to separate the social sciences of a North from those of a South that mitigate the opportunities of learning, then, necessarily involves critically reflecting not just on how those categories are conceived, but on the very apparatus of social science research. This process must be part of asking how learning might be conceived and take place between different contexts.
Learning from development
In this section I want to consider learning about development from two interrelated standpoints. The first part will consider the approach to learning in development studies and practice of the South, both as learning between countries and as learning from marginalised constituencies within countries. I argue that the schism between established modes of development knowledge production and more marginalised knowledges, such as those of the poor, is a product of the kind of weak internationalisation Appadurai (2000) talks about in reference to Area Studies, or that Parnwell (1999) depicts in relation to development studies. This tendency can be partly addressed through dialogue between development scholars and postcolonial scholars, particu- larly through the more radical conception of subaltern knowledge in postcolonial work. The argument leads to a conception of learning distinct from the liberal tendency of much development scholarship and practice. Second, I will consider how this more radical conception of learning might be developed by outlining a notion of indirect learning.
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In her study of the World Bank and the IMF, Coyle (2001) has similarly found that multilaterals have a need to project an image of having the right answers and maintaining a consensual official line. This tendency to ‘apply’ development solutions is bound up with the timescale of mainstream development projects, which puts pressure on strategies to be completed in a hurried cycle of two or three years (Mawdsley et al, 2002). Ellerman warns against the ‘self-reinforcing lock-in between development agencies and their client countries’ (2002: 289), whereby learning about problems is prevented by advice and help from a powerful outsider and an eagerness of local policy makers to jump to a ready-made solution. This ‘rage to conclude’ often leads to an espousal of ‘international best practices’—‘a tendency based not on any methods resembling social science but on a bureaucratic need to maintain elite prestige by ‘‘having an answer’’ for the client’ (Ellerman, 2002: 289). Much of the World Bank’s (1999) ‘knowledge for development’ initiative to date has involved the aggregation of information and knowledge, a process most starkly represented in the agency’s commitment to international best practices. This is not to argue for a retreat into a simple localism, but rather to insist on a dialogue which has as its object the ordinariness and contingencies of a particular development issue and place. Moving towards a ‘learning organisation’ (Ellerman, 2002: 291) requires a recasting of international development agencies like the World Bank away from an adherence to set views and a ‘paternalistic model of ‘‘teaching’’’, towards a ‘two-way’ learning process: ‘If the development agency can move beyond the Church or party model to an open learning model, then it can also move from standard know- ledge dissemination or transmission-belt methodology towards knowledge- based capacity building’. Ellerman echoes Freire (1970) in casting learning as a way of creating pedagogical and social transformations, rather than an attempt to create linear knowledge additions. This is rooted in a Socratic learning tradition of intellectual duelling, in which development is an ongoing mutual engagement rather than preconceived and predetermined. Such an engagement, however, must counter the unequal power relations that contour Bank – client relations, and in doing so must move beyond a liberalist conception of ‘integrating subaltern knowledge’ towards a more radical conception. The dissemination model of mainstream donors is, of course, an extreme case, but the example can be used to speak more broadly to the issue of learning from subaltern constituencies. An important issue at stake here relates to the appropriation of subaltern knowledge. Debates in postcolonial scholarship are useful here. As Briggs and Sharp (2004: 664) have written in relation to indigenous knowledge: ‘A central tenet of postcolonial theory is its concern with the ontological and epistemological status of the voices of subaltern peoples in Western knowledge systems, and a postcolonial interrogation of the inclusion of indigenous knowledges in development suggests caution’. Spivak (1988), writing about the desires of European leftist intellectuals to ‘speak for’ the Third World subaltern, has famously argued that the subaltern cannot speak, so imbued must s/he be with the words, phrases and cadences of ‘Western
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thought’ in order to be heard. This is to say that the subaltern cannot be heard as a consequence of the privileged position that academic researchers or development consultants occupy. This can lead to ‘epistemic violence’: ways of knowing the world outside of the language of ‘Western’ science, philosophy and development are invalidated or trivialised. Thus, ‘the subaltern must always be caught in translation, never truly expressing herself, but always already interpreted’ (Briggs & Sharp, 2004: 664). Spivak’s (1993) notions of unlearning and learning outline a formulation of ethics in this regard. ‘Unlearning’ involves ‘working hard to gain knowledge of others who occupy those spaces most closed to our privileged view and attempting to speak to those others in a way that they might take us seriously and be able to answer back’ (McEwan, 2003: 384). For Spivak, learning from one another is an ethical imperative. Learning in this sense is not about speaking for an individual or group, but developing new positions through interactions between researchers and people in disparate locations. This requires a ‘greater sensitivity to the relationship between power, authority, positionality and knowledge’ (McEwan, 2003: 351). This ethic demands a consistent critical reflection in efforts that seek to learn between different contexts and constituencies. A radical conception of learning entails a commitment to a different sort of epistemic violence—a rupture of the episteme of the Euro-American academy. Foucault may have argued that this could only occur through an insurrection of subjugated knowledges (1980; 2003). 1 In his 1976 Society Must be Defended lecture series, Foucault reflected upon the proliferation of social critiques that had emerged in the previous 15 years. These had, in part, taken aim at ‘global theories’ such as Marxism and psychoanalysis. He names these critiques ‘local critique’. These multiple perspectives (criticising things, institutions, practices, discourses) are characterised by Foucault as the ‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ (2003: 7). By subjugated knowledges he was referring to two processes. First, the excavation of historical contents that have been buried in formal systematisations. Second, the bringing forth of ‘nonconceptual knowl- edges’—hierarchically inferior knowledges, naive knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity (‘knowledges from below’, 2003: 7). Foucault contends that what is at stake in the excavation of these knowledges is ‘a historical knowledge of struggles’, because in this agenda is the memory of combat: ‘the meticulous rediscovery of struggles and the raw memory of fights’ (2003: 8). Such genealogy would not be possible, Foucault contends, were it not for ‘the removal of the tyranny of overall discourses, with their hierarchies and all the privileges enjoyed by theoretical vanguards’ (2003: 8). A central question, then, is what happens to subjugated knowledges once they are brought into play. They are not of ‘equal’ power, so what effects do they have? For McGee (1995: 205), tackling the ‘vice of Eurocentricism’ involves an epistemological transforma- tion that privileges indigenous knowledge over a hegemonic ‘Western’ conception of reality. Privileging needs to be careful of romanticising local knowledge, while at the same time sensitively addressing its subjugation.
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slum and pavement dwellers (see also Gaventa, 1999). A Groundswell (2001a) diary report written on an India – UK exchange in Mumbai argues that, while conditions in India were radically different from those in the UK:
For the UK group, the work of the [SPARC affiliates] NSDF and Mahila Milan had been extremely inspiring, and it was surprising and exciting that they shared many common experiences. Although the problems and challenges of homelessness and poverty might be different, the process for involving homeless people in creating the solutions could be very similar indeed.
Other people working with Groundswell who met the Indian visitors at an event in January 2000 in London commented on what they viewed as a potentially productive learning relationship:
We have to join together as the people who are actually living the problem, not the people coming in and telling us what the solution is. If we do that in this country and actually form a federation very similar to what they have in the South then we can actually federate with them around the world and have a unified voice (Newton, in Groundswell 2001b).
SPARC’s conception of learning, at least in this North – South instance, is closely related to its perception of Groundswell and its Northern context. If SPARC had conceived learning with Groundswell as indirect, open and unpredictable, rather than as restricted to the closed direct transfer of knowledge or experience (a view that required for SPARC some measure of similarity in economic context), then a more productive engagement might have been possible. The conceptualisation of learning as necessarily direct dismisses possibilities because of (real or perceived) differences, and is testament to the ongoing role of divisions of North and South as imaginative barriers, even in a context where the participants had opted to take part in the exchange. (See Gaventa (1999) for examples of more productive North – South NGO collaborations; see also Edwards & Gaventa, 2001). Exploring learning possibilities among civil society groups often involves addressing these sorts of myths and stereotypes. Writing about the experiences of people from the USA in visits to India and Mexico, Gaventa (1999: 35) points to the ‘amazement at the knowledge, commitment and sophistication’ participants found—‘a reality that did not fit with their received images of ‘‘backward’’ people’. He continues:
Moreover, they often gained inspiration from the commitment which they saw... ‘By getting rid of our myths, we create the desire to learn more. Understanding that we have been taught wrong and then looking at the problems and consequences of that misteaching creates enormous openings. It’s like turning a rock into a piece of clay that wants to be malleable by choice’ (quoted in Covey et al, 1995: 11, in Gaventa, 1999: 35).
Here I argue for a conceptualisation of learning alert to the possibility that it can occur not just in spite of differences, but through them. This notion of
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learning can present new opportunities and prompt innovative thinking, and points to the possibilities created by conceiving learning as indirect rather than direct. In order to develop the notion of indirect learning, I will consider an example from development studies. One instructive and provocative attempt to explore the possibilities of learning about development between North and South is a special issue of an Institute of Development Studies (IDS) Bulletin of 1998 entitled ‘Poverty and Social Exclusion in North and South’, edited by de Haan and Maxwell. De Haan and Maxwell contend that it would be ‘foolish to deny the possibility of learning across geographical boundaries’ (1998: 5), and make a series of interventions on different themes of development. The theme issue highlights a number of specific areas where connections can be made, including the nature of ‘active labour market policies’ designed to help people find work (Robinson, 1998), the nature of participation in development programmes (Gaventa, 1998), alternative routes to the reform of social welfare (Evans, 1998), and the value of food security analysis (Dowler, 1998). De Haan and Maxwell make some further suggestions: ‘What, for example, can we learn in the North from the successes with employment guarantee schemes in India or Botswana?’ (1998: 7). They make suggestions for joint research projects on specific themes: ‘Small-scale credit, participation and participatory methods, social policy, food policy, and public works; and, indeed... the meaning and measurement of poverty and social exclusion’ (de Haan & Maxwell, 1998: 8). In their editorial de Haan and Maxwell (1998: 7) argue that, even if knowledge cannot travel directly, attempts to learn between North and South can still be ‘fruitful’. In his contribution Maxwell (1998: 24) argues that ‘the point here is not to pretend that analysis and policy from one country can be read off directly from another, even within broad groupings of North and South. It is simply to demonstrate that opportunities are missed to compare and contrast’. However, elsewhere in the issue de Haan and Maxwell (1998: 7) insert a caveat: ‘Despite growing heterogeneity among developing countries and some signs of convergence between the North and parts of the South... the particularities of place and history remain important, so that lessons can rarely be transferred directly’. This is an important point, but perhaps a more useful way to conceptualise this is to emphasise that, because the particularities of place and history are important, learning can occur but usually indirectly. This requires the understanding that knowledge and ideas can change in new circumstances, and that learning can occur in creative, indirect ways. For instance, specific development strategies in the South, like public works, food policy or participation, may appear to offer little opportunity for learning in the North if the approach is to ask whether the strategies can be transferred directly. They may offer more, however, if the approach is to engage in debate around these strategies without a rigid predetermined notion of how they may be useful. More general debates about the nature of development, such as those concerned with the meaning and measurement of terms like ‘poverty’ and ‘development’, or about the possibilities of employing a livelihoods approach to development in the North, also offer a basis through which indirect learning may occur.
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economic, social, political and cultural connections often associated with globalisation, including the linking of NGOs and the common causes of poverty. He sees opportunities to develop theories and perspectives that mirror transnational trends in that they move beyond divides of North and South (Maxwell, 1998: 26). The Ford Foundation’s ‘Crossing Borders’ initiatives mentioned earlier focuses on this theme of connection. The University of Berkeley’s ‘Area Studies and the New Geographies’ activities are one set of examples here. Many of these initiatives, straddling a broadly defined international studies and geopolitics literature, seek to re-theorise established notions of ‘area’, ‘region’ and ‘border’. They have focused on the emergence of a plethora of political, economic and cultural connections and disconnections in different parts of the globe, and used them to illuminate understanding not just of regions like Africa or East Asia, but to look anew at notions like globalisation and modernity, as well as to interrogate the utility of different theoretical perspectives as they operate in different spaces. Much of this work has sought to theorise the relationship between area and globalisation, interrogating those terms in the process. Theoretically the central reference point has remained ‘Western’ theorists, including Bourdieu, Castells, Foucault, Geertz, Giddens and Habermas (Institute of International Studies, 2006). The emphasis here has been on theorising the changing geographies of localities and regions produced by new forms of connection, rather than on questions of learning. Maxwell’s (1998) useful schema of comparisons, convergences and connections offers a set of ways to conceptually connect different parts of the globe in a progressive manner. It is progressive because, while it focuses attention on the possibilities of learning between different contexts, it does not do so at the expense of the particularities of place and circumstance. Writing in a similar vein, Robinson (2002: 532) promotes ‘a more cosmopolitan approach’ to urban studies. This is an approach that seeks to bring more cities into view in urban studies, and that does so through a postcolonial critique of generalised, abstract Euro-American analytic categories. For Robinson, this is not simply about invoking deviation from a dominant Euro-American theme. Two strategies in particular are required. First, a need to decolonise Euro-American perspectives by consistently asking, ‘How are theoretical approaches changed by considering different cities and different contexts?’ (Robinson, 2002: 549). Ferguson (2006) has pointed out that in the enormous scholarly and public literatures on globalisation, positive and negative, remarkably little has been said about Africa. As he shows, an engagement with scholarship on the political economy of Africa reveals key features of how the ‘global’ works and how it might work in the future. What he sees, for example through often heavily guarded transnational enclaves of mineral extraction, is a global of ‘sharp, jagged edges; rich and dangerous traffic amid zones of generalized abjection; razor-wired enclaves next to abandoned hinterlands’ (Ferguson, 2006: 48). He does not suggest that this view from Africa reveals the ‘true nature’ of globalisation, but that it highlights ‘another perspective on the ‘‘global’’’ and he insists ‘that there is no view of ‘‘globalization’’ that ‘‘covers it all’’’
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(2006: 49). This is not an attempt to ‘add Africa and stir’, as if arriving at an all-inclusive picture, but to demonstrate that ‘the view from Africa challenges us to develop new, more situated understandings of emerging global patterns’ (2006: 49). Second, there is a need to engage, on as close a level playing field as possible, with the work of thinkers in different places: ‘If a cosmopolitan urban theory is to emerge, scholars in privileged western environments will need to find responsible and ethical ways to engage with, learn from and promote the ideas of intellectuals in less privileged places’ (Robinson, 2002: 549 – 550). This requires a critical epistemic interrogation and reworking, such as that found in Appadurai’s formulation of ‘strong internationalisation’:
[‘Strong internationalization’] is to imagine and invite a conversation about research in which... the very elements of this ethic could be the subjects of debate. Scholars from other societies and traditions of inquiry could bring to this debate their own ideas about what counts as new knowledge and what communities of judgement and accountability they might judge to be central in the pursuit of such knowledge (Appadurai, 2000: 14).
The notion of strong internationalisation is one that embodies a progressive outlook on the possibilities of learning between different spaces and constituencies, and requires an openness to distinct forms of knowledge production that do not necessarily comply with Euro-American traditions of academic knowledge production. This would involve a particular and reflexive engagement with indigenous conceptions of environment and conservation, activist-intellectual forms of knowledge about the lives of people living in slums, or regimes of academic knowledge production formulated through distinct patterns of collection, citation or judgement. There is a challenge here for academics to connect more closely and more frequently with the worlds and vocabularies of disparate scholars and activists: ‘One of the biggest disadvantages faced by activists working for the poor in fora such as the World Bank, the UN system, the WTO, NAFTA and GATT is their alienation from the vocabulary used by the university – policy nexus (and, in a different way, by corporate ideologues and strategists) to describe global problems, projects and policies. A strong effort to compare, describe and theorize ‘‘globalization-from-below’’ could help to close this gap’ (Appadurai, 2000: 17). This involves interrogation of terms like ‘development’, ‘globalisation’, ‘politics’ and ‘modernity’, and an examination of what their heterogeneity might mean. Inevitably, this must be a geographical discussion. For example, social scientists may write of politics as a shared homogeneous and abstract zone, wherein the vote, for instance, is a central ‘anonymous performance of citizenship’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 18). But, as Chatterjee (2004: 11) has written in reference to early Independent India, political actions, programmes and authority are often transmitted in the language of myth or popular religion. In this context the vote may be less an act of support for a candidate with aspirations for parliamentary presence, and more an act of faithful
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possibility of varying degrees of stability and flux: it is not the case that every encounter must always involve complete change, nor is it the case that every encounter must always involve the recreation of a periphery in the image of a centre. Translation, then, embodies a sense of creative possibility that does not reduce learning to direct transfer. (I have developed this argument elsewhere by examining the role of translation in ‘post-rationalist’ approaches to learning (McFarlane, 2006a)). In this context, we might usefully invoke Said’s (1984) development of ‘travelling theory’. 3 Said argued against the tendency to seek to apply theories wholesale or to dismiss them as completely irrelevant. He argued that the use of theory need not be reduced to this binary construction, and he regretted that much intellectual work is caught up in what he viewed at the time as an anxiety and/or criticism over the question of misinterpretation:
It implies, first of all, that the only possible alternative to slavish copying is creative misreading and that no intermediate possibility exists. Second, when it is elevated to a general principle... [it] is fundamentally an abrogation of the critic’s responsibility... Quite the contrary, it seems to me possible to judge misreadings (as they occur) as part of a historical transfer of ideas and theories from one setting to another (Said, 1984: 237).
This notion of ‘misreading’ focuses attention on the importance of change and the positive role of using what is witnessed, experienced or read about in one place in a way that need not be about trying to copy and directly apply it in another. The concept addresses a politics of replication by emphasising the importance of creativity and local relevance. An emphasis on indirect learning rallies against the dismissal of, for instance, a place, knowledge or an idea as wholly irrelevant, and draws attention to the creative and uncertain possibilities of misreadings. Concepts like translation or perspectives like travelling theory open possibilities for indirect learning and assert transformation over transfer. This argument for a new conception of learning about development between different contexts does not extend to arguing for a wholesale organisational change, so that the remit of, say, scholars working in development studies goes from local to global. Instead, the conceptual changes that I am arguing for involve a willingness to engage in examples of development transnationally, in order to move towards a richer, more postcolonial development. This might involve development scholars focused on Euro-American cities engaging with literature and colleagues working on and in different urban contexts, and in ways that go beyond simply ‘adding- on’ a case study towards developing understandings that are both more informed and more situated. In reference to development studies, Maxwell (1998: 28) suggests ways of negotiating this challenge:
There is one route I think we should not take, which is that each of us should try to merge all our work into one, covering North and South... Instead, people who specialise on the North or South will continue to do so, but should
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make new efforts to learn from each other, to explore common problems brought on by convergence, and perhaps to develop new theory together. The best place to start might be with specific topics, like public works, food policy or participation—indeed, with the meaning and measurement of terms like ‘poverty’ and ‘social exclusion’. This will enable collaboration to be built inductively, from the bottom-up.
For Slater (1997; see also 2004), an openness to different conceptions, practices and modes of knowledge production requires an ethic of respect and critical reflection, offering one set of possibilities for beginning to negotiate the unequal power relations of such engagements. This approach echoes Spivak’s (1999) ethical conception of learning, and the radical conception discussed earlier:
In a world increasingly configured by global connectivity, a strong case can be made for posing the significance of another three Rs—respect, recognition and reciprocity. If our geopolitical imagination in the field of knowledge is going to be open, nomadic, combinatory, critical and inquiring, it can displace the hold of Euro-Americanist thought and find ways of learning from the theoretical reflexivity of different writers and academics from other worlds and cultures... Mutual respect and recognition must include, if they are to be of any meaningful ethical value, the right to be critical and different on both sides of any cultural or intellectual border. Reciprocity and dialogue can only emerge if there is a will to go beyond indifference and historically sedimented pre- judgements; to engage in analytical conversations with others in ways that can make the outside part of the inside and vice-versa has the potential to engender mutually beneficial encounters (Slater, 1997: 648).
This image of a respectful form of strong internationalisation also entails working for new collectives of ‘elite’ and ‘subaltern’, which are reflexive of who starts and controls them as well as who the members are. It is an image that opens another set of challenges at the centre of the power relations of academic knowledge production: learning how to learn from below (see Brohman, 1996; Edwards, 1990). For Spivak (2003: 52), this involves far more than just ‘learning about other cultures’: ‘this is imagining yourself, really letting yourself be imagined (experience that impossibility) without guarantees, by and in another culture’. Such an effort would in part echo Spivak’s (1993) ethical formulation of unlearning and learning, where learning in new collectives is an ethical imperative that outlines a horizon of transformation: towards a postcolonial project as an ‘ethic-politics’ of becoming, emphasising the processual and anticipatory—in McEwan’s (2003: 349) words, ‘recognising a condition that does not yet exist, but working nevertheless to bring that about’. Developing these sorts of collectives in research around, for instance, development, can contribute to new ways of imagining the research enterprise, as well as places and regions. This involves asking not just how ‘others’ see development, but how they see the world (in regional terms and in other ways)—in short, ‘how does the world look... from other locations (social, cultural, national)?’
COLIN MCFARLANE
North and South Divide Development Learning
Course: Chemistry (181)
University: Cebu Institute of Technology – University
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