Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity 9780472031412, 0472031414

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FRAGMENTS OF DEVELOPMENT

FRAGMENTS OF DEVELOPMENT Nation, Gender, AND THE

Space of Modernity

Suzanne Bergeron

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS Ann Arbor

First paperback edition 2006 Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2004 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2009 2008 2007 2006

5 4 3 2

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bergeron, Suzanne. Fragments of development : nation, gender, and the space of modernity / Suzanne Bergeron. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-472-11403-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Development economics—Philosophy. 2. National state— Economic aspects. 3. Feminist theory. I. Title. hd75.b494 2004 338.9'001—dc22 2004001353 isbn 0-472-03141-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN13 978-0-472-03141-2

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

vii

ONE

Narratives of the Nation: Modernizing the Global South in the Space of Development 1 TWO

Mapping Modernization and Growth

30

THREE

Coloniality, Modernity, and the Nation-State in Dependency Theory 68 FOUR

Structural Adjustment and Its Discontents FIVE

Development and Globalization: Toward a Feminist (Re)Vision 140 Notes

165

Bibliography Index

195

175

91

Preface and Acknowledgments

The essays in this book are the product of several years of work, multiple locations for writing and research, and a number of different approaches to the study of development. Over the course of this journey I have been enriched by the advice, support, and encouragement of numerous people. The core ideas that inform this book were generated in the 1990s when I was a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame trying to make sense of the economic literature on structural adjustment. In the course of my reading and conversations with economists I encountered a range of divergent economic perspectives on stabilization and adjustment re›ecting different political commitments, analytical assumptions, schools of economic thought, institutional af‹liations, and so forth. I nonetheless noticed some striking similarities among these different perspectives in terms of a shared discourse of the economy that participated in determining what sorts of voices and perspectives got a hearing and what sorts of alternatives could or could not be proposed. For example, the World Bank’s view of adjustment and those of its critics may differ over the pace of reform and the role of the state, yet they all couch their ideas in a technocratic and depoliticized language. While they disagree about policy outcomes, there is a shared reliance on conventional representations of the national economy that imply that it constitutes a functional logic to be obeyed while at the same time providing a sense of imagined (economic) community through narratives of shared sacri‹ce and bene‹t. While they may question the expertise of their ideological opponents, they by and large agree on the nature of, and the need for, a particular sort of expert intervention in the global South. Their stories about economic processes and the behavior of economic actors may unfold in different ways, but they still imagine that they are writing in a detached, objective manner about an independent “real world” as opposed to seeing their part in the construction

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

of what is taken to be real. And while some of the foundations of this discourse on the economy were at that time challenged from within the discipline—for example, an emerging feminist economics questioned its detachment and value-neutrality by examining the implicit masculinity of its supposedly unsexed agents (Ferber and Nelson 1993)—I found that many feminist development economists intervening in the debate left its technocratic approach, its imaginary mapping of economic space, and its construction of expertise largely intact. Much of the debate on stabilization and adjustment in the early 1990s revolved around the extent to which the national economy had ceased to become a meaningful entity in the context of a globalizing world economy. The structural adjustment policy prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank were largely based on the idea that the developing countries needed to adjust to the new “realities” of the global economy by reducing the scope of state intervention. In contrast, the policy recommendations of structuralist economists, feminist economists, and other critics of IMF and World Bank approaches tended to argue for maintaining or expanding the role of the state, in part to protect these economies from the worst ravages of globalization. Not least of all, for most of its participants, the debate centered on the related and well-worn binaries of Left versus Right, state versus market, national management versus the global order. But while advocating for the expanded role of markets and calling for a reduction in the role of the state, economic reform at the level recommended by the IMF and World Bank, I noticed, often increased the power of the executive branch of government and the central bank in the countries implementing their policy prescriptions. Further, the models of the IMF and World Bank not only framed the problems in terms of government intervention—they also viewed the solutions in terms of changes that could be made by the government acting upon the national economy (‹scal policy, monetary policy, privatization, etc.). The analysis was limited in a way that left out the role of issues as basic as supply shocks that could affect the economy as well as other factors outside the government’s control or manipulation. The economic models of the IMF and World Bank were, at their very heart, portrayals of economic life as responsive to the expert intervention that these institutions had to offer, delivered through each adjusting country’s government policy. Meanwhile, on the other end of the debate, the unspoken assumptions of those who argued in favor of maintaining or increasing the role of the state limited their prescriptions to very narrow interventions because anything greater would

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

interfere with the pre-given logic of the national economy and/or the discipline in›icted on each economy by the abstract and universal forces of global capital. How was it that the national economy—the always presumed but never explicitly identi‹ed object of stabilization and adjustment—could be presented in these different frameworks as completely subject to expert management and control and at the same time an entity with a logic of its own and a force before which all other social and political agendas must bow? This taken-for-granted object, through its representations in national income accounts, econometric models, and myriad other conventions, seemed to have effects on economic thinking that I had heretofore not imagined. What had seemed reasonable and commonplace now appeared strange and begged for further analysis. This was how I began to explore ideas that would become the focus of this book: the origins and implications of the idea of the national economy as a knowable, uni‹ed, and manageable entity in development thought. In a paper I presented at Notre Dame, I sketched out the broad contours of what is now the more nuanced and detailed analysis presented in chapter 1 of this volume. I contended that the invention of the national economy as an object of modern management and control occurred in the mid–twentieth century when intellectual developments such as the emergence of macroeconomics and econometrics as new sub‹elds of the discipline, the in›uence of the corporate managerial ideal, and a whole host of other ideas coalesced with a series of crises and events including the Great Depression, the decline of empire, and wartime experiences with planning. While my thinking intersected with that of the “rhetoric of economics” movement associated with D. McCloskey (1985) and others, I did not examine economic rhetoric and narratives as representations of already existing economic practices as much as I focused on how economic constructions of the national economy serve to contain and constitute notions of reality. For example, in a paper I presented at the ‹rst International Association for Feminist Economics conference in Amsterdam in 1993 I traced out some of the ways that gender in›uences the way that economists imagine the national economy, showing also some of the social and political effects of these gendered narratives. Eventually, I combined these ideas with other work to complete my Ph.D. thesis. While this current volume differs signi‹cantly from that earlier work for many reasons, not the least of which being that I have been able to venture even further outside of the disciplinary boundaries required by graduate

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

training, a few words need to be said about the in›uence of my graduate experience on this project. When I was enrolled there, Notre Dame was an exciting place to study heterodox economics, and one of only a handful of graduate programs in the ‹eld where one could focus on social justice issues. The foundational mission of the program was to provide graduate training to students who were interested in economic alternatives by teaching them to think both inside and outside of the dominant discourse. Students were trained to speak the language of orthodox economic theory in order to understand its inner workings. But we were also encouraged to think outside of the mainstream and were given an opportunity to view economic problems from Marxist, postmodern, institutionalist, feminist, and/or post-Keynesian perspectives based on our own inclinations. To paraphrase feminist economist Diane Elson (1998) on the importance of working both inside and outside of the dominant discourse, the curriculum recognized that if those advocating for social justice only work outside of mainstream discourses and practices, we won’t know how to change the dominant structures of power; yet if we only work inside of the mainstream, our work will likely amount to small improvements in the formulation of models or collection of statistics that do not actually transform people’s lives. My ability to understand the inner workings of mainstream models while at the same time analyze them from a place outside of the dominant discourse is certainly in›uenced by the graduate training I received at Notre Dame, and I am thankful to be part of that too-brief period when the graduate program in economics at Notre Dame was a place that nurtured that vision as well as students such as myself. My ability to analyze economics from a discursive space outside of it is also in›uenced by my association with a number of ongoing projects that are engaged in creating alternative economic knowledges. Feminist international political economists such as Isabella Bakker (1994), V. Spike Peterson (1992), and the authors in the collection edited by Marianne Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan (2000) draw upon feminist social theory to denaturalize the hegemonic masculinities that shore up the languages and practices of mainstream political economy approaches. Their exposure of the gendered hierarchies that privilege certain actors and practices over others—market over nonmarket, global over local, ‹nance capital over social welfare, and so forth—has created space for thinking outside of these narrow and ultimately defeating frameworks. Their in›uence on my work is evident in the pages that follow, especially chapter 5. I have also been intellectually inspired and sustained by the emerging

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

postdevelopment approach exempli‹ed by Arturo Escobar (1995a), which shows that a major impetus behind development economics has been the construction of the Third World as a set of abnormalities and pathologies that only the expert intervention of development economists and institutions can cure. Escobar’s intervention as well as that of James Ferguson (1990), Timothy Mitchell (1995), Jane Parpart (1993), and others have made much more explicit the link between knowledge and power in development thought, and helped me to think much more clearly about how constructions of economic space were used to frame the Third World as a suitable target for intervention. My encounter with this work also encouraged an intellectual migration toward postcolonial theory, which among other things aided me in developing a framework for understanding the multilayered meanings and thus fragilities contained in development’s constructions of economic space in the global South, as well as the tensions and contradictions that exist among competing metaphors of the nation (a theme which is developed in chapters 2 and 3). Together, these literatures also helped me to imagine a different set of possibilities and futures outside of mainstream development practices. The Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA), which has long been focused on developing an anti-essentialist approach to understanding economic processes, including but not limited to the project of rethinking Marxism, has provided another source of intellectual nourishment. Some of the major sources of intellectual sustenance include the following, although by no means is this an exhaustive list. From Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick (1987) I learned to challenge the ubiquitous portrayal of a world dominated by capitalist logic, replacing it with an approach that could take into account the multiple capitalist and noncapitalist forms that existed in often-contradictory relation to each other in modern economic life. I have learned much from Jack Amariglio and David Ruccio over the past ‹fteen years or so. Their work on modern economics (1994) helped me to better understand why stories that focused on the existence of a single capitalist logic (whether in the con‹nes of national economic space or as a global force) were so compelling. Modern economics, they contend, prefers narratives that emphasize order, centering, and certainty, and economists lean toward those theories that portray economic outcomes as orderly as opposed to chaotic; that describe economies and individuals as uni‹ed rather than multiple and decentered; and that portray economic knowledge as certain and reliable. This preference tends to push to the margins or attempt to contain those narratives that might disrupt

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

their presumed order. Such disruptive forces include those people, practices, and activities (including noncapitalist activities) that do not conform to the presumed logic. Thus economic discourse participates in a form of “epistemic violence” in which these heterogenous people, places, practices, and activities are written out of the economy (Spivak 1990). J. K. GibsonGraham (1996) has provided a feminist framework for recognizing the myriad ways that this modern and capital-centric discourse of economics contributes to such epistemic violence, while at the same time equipping me to point toward the silences and begin to recuperate those voices left out of the development conversation. In addition to these forms of intellectual sustenance, the writing of this book was made possible by more direct individual and institutional forms of support. The Women’s Studies program at the University of Michigan–Dearborn provided an environment that nurtured its completion, and I would particularly like to thank Rashmi Luthra, Director of Women’s Studies, for all of the hours of good conversation about feminism, nationalism, and development as well as for her steady guidance of the program these past few years. Drucilla Barker read a draft of the manuscript, and her enthusiasm for the project, along with her incisive comments and many helpful suggestions for revision, spurred me on and helped me to clarify my ideas. David Ruccio played an invaluable role in the development and working out of this project during its formative stages and remains an important source of insight and encouragement. The following people read earlier drafts of chapters or sections of chapters and provided helpful suggestions: Jack Amariglio, Isabella Bakker, Teresa Ghilarducci, Denis Goulet, Julie Nelson, Esther Mirjam-Sent, and Richard Wolff. The Association for Economic and Social Analysis, the International Association for Feminist Economics, the Union for Radical Political Economics, and the Feminist and Gender Theory section of the International Studies Association have provided me with multiple and overlapping intellectual communities in which I was able to work out many of my ideas. Responses that I received on presentations of parts of this work at the annual conferences of these organizations helped to sharpen my thinking. Thanks to Enid Arvidson, Bina Agarwal, S. Charusheela, George DeMartino, Diane Elson, Robert Garnett, Ulla Grapard, Julie Graham, Denise Johnson, Nitasha Kaul, Serap Kayetekin, Amy Lind, Kathy Rankin, Stephen Resnick, Warren Samuels, Cynthia Wood, and

Preface and Acknowledgments

xiii

other participants in these conference sessions for their comments and suggestions. A Rackham faculty fellowship from the University of Michigan supported research toward the completion of this book during the summer of 2001. Maureen McEachern provided able library research assistance. Ellen McCarthy at the University of Michigan Press helped to nurture this project, and I thank her for her patience, humor, and ‹ne editorial guidance. Last but not least, my thanks go to Bruce Pietrykowski. His imagination, keen insight, and political commitment have inspired me to become a better thinker and writer, and I thank him for his unstinting love and support. I would like to thank the University of Chicago Press for permission to use portions of previously published copyrighted material. A shorter version of chapter 5 appeared as “Political Economy Discourses of Globalization and Feminist Politics” in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, special issue on globalization and gender, 27 (summer) 2001: 983–1006.

ONE

Narratives of the Nation: Modernizing the Global South in the Space of Development If we were to think in terms of a “binding agent” for development are we simply not saying that development depends on the ability and determination of a nation and its citizens to organize themselves for development? —Albert Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development The relations between people and the nation, the nation and the state, relations which nationalism claims to have resolved once and for all, are relations which continue to be contested and therefore open to negotiation all over again. —Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World

Open almost any international development report, country study, or academic paper dealing with development in the global South, and you are likely to ‹nd nations being represented as self-contained and natural economic entities. Models of development generally take for granted that each nation under study is discrete: connected, certainly, to other countries through trade, migration, and other forms of economic and cultural exchange, but a conceptually distinct unit nonetheless. These conventional representations are, however, rarely seen as just that: conventions.1 Models, statistics, and narratives of national economies are used as if they are simply practical and value-free ways of organizing economic knowledge about the global South. But economic representations never simply mirror an external reality. Their objects are at least partly constructed by the discourse that describes them. They are an effect of social, political, and cultural

2

FRAGMENTS OF DEVELOPMENT

processes of representation that development theory both re›ects and reproduces. In this chapter, I provide an introduction to the ways that development theory has constructed the nation as an object of inquiry. I examine the historical and institutional context in which “development” emerged as a national project in the mid–twentieth century. While other writers have examined the construction of the national project of development, it has mainly been in the context of its growing irrelevance in an era of neoliberalism and globalization. In contrast, the main purpose here is not to locate the “real” economic space of “local economies,” “national economies,” “regional economies,” or “global economies” but rather to think about what ideas about space and economics do and what kinds of social and political effects these have on development theory and practice. The naturalization of a relatively closed national economy in the post–World War II era is therefore approached here not as the correct (or incorrect) identi‹cation of the boundaries of the economy but rather as the convergence of a number of in›uences that de‹ned it as a particular sort of “imagined (economic) community” that functioned as both a space of economic regulation and imagined community of shared economic interests.2 Such in›uences include changes in economic theory during the early part of the twentieth century that constructed a vision of the national economy as a legible object for state control and regulation, the role of the nationalist struggles of former colonies in framing development strategies and practices, and the in›uence of Enlightenment ideals of sovereignty and self-determination on the imaginings of development economists and political leaders. These reinforced and were reinforced by other key aspects of the discourse of development, such as its tendency to use anthropomorphic metaphors to de‹ne the nations of the global South as children that need to “mature” and catch up to the modern countries of North America and Western Europe (Nandy 1983). These threads came together to support a powerful structure of meaning in development theories and practices. It is nonetheless a structure fraught with its own tensions and instabilities, and these tensions are explored in the pages that follow as well. Gender meanings are an important in›uence on the way that the nation is imagined in development thought, but the existing literature on the concept of the national economy is notable for its lack of attention to gender. However, recent feminist research has drawn attention to the role of gender meanings as central to the project of nation building in the con-

Narratives of the Nation

3

text of development (e.g., Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989; McClintock 1993; Jayawardena 1986). For example, in the postcolonial imagination of nationalist elites, women were often designated as the bearers of “traditions” associated with the historical or mythical past of the nation, and one result of this is policies that were developed to encourage and support women’s so-called traditional role. Much feminist analysis has focused on the impact of colonialism and subsequent framing of nationalism and decolonization on the discourses of gender and development in the global South. The in›uence of Western economic development theories and their narratives of the nation has also been examined in recent work in development studies, creating space for examining the related assumptions about nation and gender in these theories (Escobar 1995a; Parpart and Marchand 1995; Crush 1995). For example, the imagined community of the nation in development economics was, and continues to be, based on making much of women’s work invisible through masculinist notions of economic activity and economic citizenship. And feminist analysis provides an epistemological framework for understanding how the modernist and positivist orientations of development theory have been based on gendered meanings that privilege the masculine characteristics of control, sovereignty, and progress in ways that have had effects on the way that national development was imagined. It also unmasks the various ways in which the social construction of gender collaborates with colonial discourse in representing countries of the global South as the feminized Others of the modern and autonomous developed nations and represents development as a masculine struggle for mastery, modernity, and control (Scott 1995). In the sections that follow, I show how the modern conceptualization of the national economy created a link between economic development and the modern nation-state, both as a geopolitical entity and as an agent of change. The idea that the national economy came to constitute what James Scott (1998) refers to as a “legible” entity supported hegemonic postwar ideas about apolitical expertise in development theory and practice. Related to this is the way that ideas about the nation constructed economic identities via a sense collective well-being within the nation. By providing territorial coherence internally, economic theories and practices also traded on a particular set of notions about national sovereignty, which were in turn expressed in terms of regulating activities across territorial borders (Gupta 1992, 71).

4

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Fixing the Developing Country Economy The project of development, and the corresponding construction of the nation as the object of development policies, occurred in the context of an emerging world order that was characterized by growing tensions between the socialist and capitalist worlds and the break up of colonial empires in Asia and Africa after World War II.3 The “discovery” of underdevelopment at midcentury, coupled with a determination on the part of Western governments and social scientists to effect change, marked a new way of making sense of the world.4 As H. W. Arndt’s (1987) history of development thought argues, poverty and hunger had certainly existed in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (as they had in Europe and North America) prior to 1945 but had not received a great deal of attention by world leaders or academics. Yet by 1950 thousands were waging war on underdevelopment from government of‹ces, universities, and the United Nations, as well as newly formed Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank (Arndt 1987, 44). During these same years, development economics went from being the most neglected to the most studied branch of the discipline (Galbraith 1979, 26). As is the case with the discovery of any new social problem and attempts to resolve it, underdevelopment brought into existence representations, discourses, and practices that in turn shaped the experience of development (Escobar 1995a). Included among these is the manner in which this project revolved around narratives of the nation as a naturalized economic unity. Economic progress was measured by a new statistic of national well-being, gross national product (GNP). The countries of the world were organized within some variant of a “national model” of the economy by the end of World War II (Banuri and Schor 1992). The North Atlantic capitalist economies had adopted a Keynesian stabilization and social welfare policy. The postwar Bretton Woods agreements set into place an international monetary system founded on ‹xed exchange rates, based on the U.S. dollar and backed up by gold reserves. This system of exchange rate stability supported international trade even as it rendered capital relatively immobile (given the lack of integration in international ‹nancial markets). It also favored national macroeconomic stabilization and planning. Insulation from external monetary ›uctuations could be counted on by governments, which could implement ‹scal and monetary policy accordingly. With the Soviet Union’s attempt “to build socialism in one country,” socialist development was also conceived of within this discursive framework of the

Narratives of the Nation

5

nation-state as an economic unit, which, as Eric Hobsbawm (1990) points out, was a rather interesting turn of events given the internationalist bent of earlier Marxist approaches to economy and society. In this context the development of the global South was imagined by both the liberal and socialist camps as a process of national, state-led economic development closely linked with an ideology of national economic sovereignty (Arndt 1987; Preston 1996). How development came to be conceptualized in this way is dependent upon a number of interrelated strands of thinking that are themselves contextualized within twentieth-century discourses of nation and economy. These include a logic of “authoritative intervention” emerging in the early twentieth century in the space of the economy; the impact of the example of Soviet socialist planning on economic theorists and Third World policymakers; the impetus toward protectionism in the name of national sovereignty, re›ected, for instance, in the work of Latin American economic and social theorists; and the “pursuit of effective nationstatehood” (Myrdal 1968, 65) following decolonization and the creation of new nations in Africa and Asia. Most analyses of the embrace of the national model of the economy within the dominant paradigm of development argue that it is strongly if not completely linked to the then-ruling assumption that economic outcomes should not be left to market forces alone (Arndt 1987; Preston 1996).5 In principle, development policy could have been imagined as something that was primarily directed by local communities for themselves, or by the Bretton Woods organizations, or even by the relevant colonial powers in the case of much of Africa and Asia. But with the exception of the handful of European colonists who did not want to relinquish their colonial territories and some Pan-Africanists, the only imaginable and legitimate agent of intervention was the national state: conceived, as exempli‹ed in the Hirschman quote at the beginning of the chapter, as the common will of a nation’s people to develop. Such imaginings were not limited to the circles of anticolonial nationalist movements in the South but were part of the way that Western economic development theories made sense of the world. And, as it turns out, such imaginings were not limited to state-led models but became part of the way that many economic liberals justi‹ed their free market–oriented policy prescriptions as well (Helleiner 2002; Bergeron 1996). The enframing of the national economy in the development imaginary is the product of changing notions of the economy that had occurred

6

FRAGMENTS OF DEVELOPMENT

between the 1920s and 1950s. A wave of economic crises culminating in the Great Depression and the decline of empire in the West, together with the development of new managerial techniques that were thought to be transferable to the state, led to a reimagining of government involvement in the economy and, with it, a new view of the object of that intervention (Mitchell 1998, 91). With the development of econometrics and macroeconomics, the term “economy” came to refer to the structure of relations of production, circulation, and consumption within the space of the nation. This structure was viewed as self-contained and subject to its own dynamics. The 1936 publication of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which marks the beginning of modern macroeconomics, provides an early encounter with the idea that the nation is a manageable economic unit represented in terms of aggregate data (production, employment, price level, and investment). Keynes makes a case for macroeconomic stabilization and growth policies. But in order to do so, he also has to present the national economy as a legible object, one subject to the manipulation of experts and government policy. The invention of econometrics during this period also aimed to picture, in a single mathematical model, the interrelated processes of the economy. Jan Tinbergen, a pioneer of econometrics and macrodynamic models, explicitly de‹nes the economy in this manner, reinforcing representations of this object as separate and legible. In a 1935 article he refers to two elements in a business cycle model, the ‹rst being “the system of relations which de‹nes the structure of the economic community to be considered in our theory” and, second, the outside in›uences on this structure (Tinbergen 1935, 242 emphasis added). Factors such as population growth, social and cultural forces, other countries, and, especially, the force that was most able to affect it—the state—were de‹ned as external to it (Mitchell 1998, 91). Though the new macroeconomic theories of Keynes and Tinbergen did not explicitly theorize boundaries of this “structure of the economic community” as the nation-state, the aggregates of unemployment, investment, and GNP had a spatial referent that was always already the nationstate (Radice 1984, 121). While the notion of the economy as a distinct, disembedded domain of social life had existed since the eighteenth century, this idea that an economic structure formed a self-contained object subject to its own internal logic, affected by certain outside in›uences, and in part constructed through its association with the nation as a community was a new one. However, only a handful of scholars have argued that ideas about the func-

Narratives of the Nation

7

tioning of the economy in the space of the nation changed in the early twentieth century. Among them, Timothy Mitchell has offered the most comprehensive account of the emergence of the national economy as a new object of state manipulation and control. Using Foucault’s notion of governmentality—the processes by which the state develops new tactics of management over its population, which include portrayals of social life as responsive to government policy—Mitchell explains that the creation of the economy as a self-contained manageable object with ‹xed geospatial boundaries represents an instance of the state increasing its managerial control in the twentieth century. While Foucault locates the creation of the economy as an object of state control in the name of national well-being within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mitchell argues that this earlier object is in fact very different from the one that emerged during the early twentieth century. The idea of social intervention carried out in the name of the common good has its roots in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses of social control (Rabinow 1990). British and French censuses undertaken in the eighteenth century by statisticians like Adolphe Quetelet and Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet, for instance, had the goal of de‹ning the social body of each nation, ‹ltering out the individual particularities to derive general facts about the population. As historians of science such as Ian Hacking point out, the idea behind these national statistics projects transferred a medical notion from the individual body to the body politic, giving rise to a set of measures, assessments, and interventions aimed at diagnosing and curing the national social body as a whole (1990, 22–39). However, as Mitchell (1998) argues, the ‹eld of intervention in this earlier period was the population-as-object, not the economy-as-object in the twentieth-century sense.6 The national economy in mercantilist and classical economic thought was not a managerial object but rather a social body that consisted of things, where the countries with the most things were the most civilized (Buck-Morss 1995). “Savage nations,” Adam Smith wrote, are poor, “civilized nations” are wealthy (1937, viii, cited in Buck-Morss 1995). Classical political economy was conceived within this general framework of managing the wealth of the population. The early political economists certainly viewed production, distribution, and consumption as distinct and separable economic processes, but the term “economy” did not refer to the interrelated totality of these processes within the space of the nation nor as an object of management. As Foucault so aptly puts it, early political economy stressed “the unknowability for the sovereign of eco-

8

FRAGMENTS OF DEVELOPMENT

nomic processes and, as a consequence, the impossibility of an economic sovereignty” (1991, 106). The representations of the economy that gained currency between 1920 and 1950, in contrast, re›ected a reordering of space and identity in which these processes were imagined to be self-contained within a national space subject to its own internal logic. In the twentiethcentury construction of the national economy it was viewed as “subject to . . . management by an externally situated state” in a way that “could not have been imagined within the terms of 19th century political economy” (Mitchell 1998, 93). This approach became pervasive. Some free-market liberals, most notably Austrian economists such as Friedrich Hayek, challenged these emerging ideas by contending that the economy was far too complex to be known and managed in any kind of detail from above. But the thinking of most free-market neoclassical economists of the latter half of the twentieth century was ‹xed within this same imagery that Mitchell describes, the only difference being that it was applied to arguments about the predictable outcomes that would obtain by allowing the market to regulate the national economy. There is a con›uence of factors that contributed to this change in thinking. One of these is the shifting rhetoric of economic theory. The economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was often pictured through biological metaphors (Poovey 1998). For example, as Susan Buck-Morss notes, Smith regarded the economy as a “social body” connected by an invisible hand, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau compared the economy with a living human body in which different sectors represented different organs and functions (Buck-Morss 1995). Friedrich List (1837) considered the nation to be like a body and the individuals within it analogous to molecules. The image of the economy as an organism yielded narratives that often identi‹ed it as a disorderly, sometimes uncontrollable force (Poovey 1998). This was not out of line with many scienti‹c discourses of the period, which identi‹ed nature as a threatening and out of control feminine subject, thus naturalizing the idea that humans need to control and dominate nature in order to diffuse the threat (Merchant 1980, xvii). As Mary Poovey, Carolyn Merchant, and other feminists have argued, these organic images eventually gave way to reconceptualizations of reality as a more mechanistic, machinelike object that would be amenable to idealized masculine ways of knowing that emphasize rationality, control, and order. This movement from organic to mechanical objectivity, as Ted Porter (1995) argues, also helped to create a set of decision rules that seem democratic and neutral. In the case of economics, this transformation took place

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9

in the late nineteenth century, when marginal utility theory created an economics described in terms of a physics metaphor, and thus a mechanical referent (Mirowski 1984).7 As Michael Heilperin (1960) and, later, Harry Johnson (1967) note, the concept of “economic nationalism” is a recent invention. The ‹rst prominent instance of its use was in 1928, and it was only after the crisis and reconstruction of the economy after the 1930s that the term became widely known (Heilperin 1960, 16). Here, a distinction can be made between the state-led practice of mercantilism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, later, the notion of protectionism, which was used to connote the opposite of free trade. These have been incorrectly labeled as early instances of what subsequently came to be identi‹ed as economic nationalism, for in both mercantilism and protectionism, the focus was the role of the state rather than the nation (Heilperin 1960, 25; Helleiner 2002).8 Eric Hobsbawm’s (1990) analysis of nationalism corroborates this historical account. He contends that in the nineteenth century most liberal political economists did not think of the nation as an object of development per se. David Ricardo’s trade theory, for example, was aimed at maximizing global economic ef‹ciency, and thinkers like John Stuart Mill shared this cosmopolitan world view. This does not mean that economic processes in the space of the nation did not have a role in their thinking. The division of labor discussed in Ricardo’s international trade theory, for example, takes place in the space of the nation. Still, there was little sustained analysis of the national economy in the work of most economists, and while they occasionally defended their policies on the grounds of “national interest,” they tended to link outcomes to the well-being of humanity in general. As Stephen Neff puts it, “it could make no sense [for nineteenth-century political economy] even to think in terms of national economic development, because the nation-state, from this perspective, was simply not a ‘natural’ economic unit” (1990, 41). Liberal economists did not really know how to talk about the national economy as a distinct object. And when the nation was analyzed, the assumption of liberal economics was that it was “second best to world unity” (Hobsbawm 1990, 31).9 This is not to suggest that nineteenth-century liberal economists ignored the nation. Ricardo, for instance, developed his theory of comparative advantage with reference to the division of labor within a given nation, and Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number) refers to the general welfare of the nation (Hobsbawm 1990; Bergeron 1996). However, this was not the same as advocating for economic nationalist goals (Helleiner 2002,

10

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313), nor should it be confused with imagining the nation as a managerial object as conveyed in twentieth-century representations of the national economy.10 The emergence of the national economy as an object that was aligned with a notion of economic coordination within the space of the nation in the twentieth century was in part supported by changes in thinking that accompanied the growth of the corporate ‹rm in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The large corporations that were increasingly dominating the economic scene at this time needed greater levels of coordination between different aspects of production and thus conscious “scienti‹c” planning by managers. In the wake of the perceived successes of economic administration toward the goals of these corporate entities, and in conjunction with state-led economic mobilization during World War I, U.S. economists such as Wesley Mitchell and Simon Kuznets began to argue in favor of a similar type of coordination of the national economy through a managerialist state. These economists were in›uenced by a cadre of professional managerial elites who came to actively espouse scienti‹c intervention in the economy (Adelstein 1991). This group includes the Taylor Society, made up of devotees of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scienti‹c management approach, which in the late 1920s started to focus its attention on using economic and engineering expertise to achieve the goal of “economic balance” at the level of the national economy (Pabon 1992, 162). The success of the planned wartime economy during the two world wars (and later, the Marshall Plan) further bolstered the con‹dence of managerialists as to the potential for economic direction. The basic assumptions that make this managerial system persuasive include the supposition that the object to be managed is separated from other factors such as culture, social norms, other economies, and, as already discussed, the institution that was most capable of altering it: the state. This object, for economists such as Keynes, Tinbergen, Kuznets, and their followers, was the national economy. As Kuznets puts it in his 1941 book on economic measurement: It cannot be denied . . . that the authority of the state often lends considerable independence and autonomy to the economic life within its borders; and that states impress upon their inhabitants a consciousness of a kind that stimulates a desire to appraise the results of economic activity within their boundaries. It is of the essence to the state

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that it sets itself up as the sovereign authority, and hence the authority to guide and manage economic destinies, and since national income estimates, as well as other quantities of economic measurement, are indispensable guides to such policy, they should be for units corresponding to the areas within which state power can be exercised. (52) Like a corporation, the nation was conceived as a functional economic system that could be grasped and managed by economic expertise (Adelstein 1991; Drache and Gertler 1991). Picturing the national economy as a functional whole coincided with economists’ increasing claims to expert knowledge. Like the managers of the corporation, economists and state policymakers using economic models of this abstracted object were viewed as trained, scienti‹c personnel who ordered processes from above. This move also incorporates and/or delegitimates the knowledges of those not designated as experts. As Taylor puts it, The managers assume the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past had been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae. . . . All possible brainwork should be removed from the shop. (1911, cited in Standing 1999, 20) Similar to the deskilling processes that took place on the Taylorist shop ›oor, the role of traditional and local knowledge about economic practices was increasingly disregarded by the emerging science of national economic management. It was usurped by a discourse of expertise. As Edwin Nourse, the ‹rst chair of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisors, stated: Economic theorists have done a great deal of work in recent years in the area of private business in analyzing the economics of the ‹rm. Of no less importance is the economics of the economy, that is the total economic process. . . . Passage of the Employment Act not only constituted a formal recognition of the integral character of the economics of the economy, but also set up speci‹c machinery for dealing with this problem in the spirit of science, with the best tools that economic science can provide, and with trained scienti‹c personnel. (1953, cited in Mitchell 1998)

12

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The legitimacy of this way of seeing the nation as a bounded and integrated totality that could be managed from above with “the best tools that economic science can provide, and with trained scienti‹c personnel” was, as R. P. Adelstein emphasizes, reinforced by a rhetoric that constructed the nation as an economic collective pursuing a common goal, just as scienti‹c management of the ‹rm was presented as contributing to the common good of the corporation as a whole. The state was viewed as a “coordinating machinery” designed to promote general well-being by creating a “true concert or harmony of interests” (Hawley 1978, 311–12). The speci‹cation of a national economic goal such as increasing GNP, for example, presumed that policy could be identi‹ed with the general public interest. The construction of the national economy via this rhetoric allows it to function in the economic imagination as a limited and controllable unit and a “pragmatic collective” of like-minded citizens (Adelstein 1991, 161). But this “modern totality” of social cohesion in the space of the nation, as literary critic Homi Bhabha refers to it, needs to be analyzed for what it takes in as well as what it leaves out (1994, 142–43). The “imagined community” of the national economy, as we see in subsequent chapters, is as much a product of the sites, practices, classes, and peoples that it pushes beyond its boundaries as those that remain within it (see also Anderson 1991). While the major focus of this chapter, and indeed this book, is on the way that intervention in the name of the national economy was authorized within procapitalist theories and contexts (a focus taken in part because earlier scholarship has falsely associated economic nationalism almost exclusively with the socialist imagination), the connections between these perspectives and aspects of the socialist-planning legacy need to be mentioned brie›y here as well. The managerial ideal that animated many North American economists and policymakers in the mid–twentieth century had its clear counterpart in the Soviet Union. As David Ruccio has demonstrated, a central feature of the economic rationale of socialist planning was the ideal of authoritative intervention undertaken in the name of collective well-being. The national economy was presented in Soviet economic plans as a ‹xed, separate object within the control of a unitary, scienti‹c, and effective planning authority (Ruccio 1986a, 1986b). To the extent that socialist development was often carried out in a hostile international context, the rhetoric of national improvement through planning against these outside aggressors only strengthened the idea that the national economy was a self-contained cohesive unit. Further, many national liberation struggles in the global South were in›uenced by socialist theories that supported

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explicitly nationalist economic programs (often tied to notions of economic sovereignty). In addition, the economic organization of the Soviet Union contributed to a more general vision of development as a process of scienti‹c, national planning for liberals and socialists alike. The success of Soviet industrialization in the 1920s and 1930s seemed to provide empirical con‹rmation of the state’s ability to manage and transform the economy and sparked serious interest in and debates around planning among intellectuals in the United Kingdom and United States (including Keynes) during this period. Growth in output and improvements in living standards such as health care and education in the Soviet Union suggested to an emerging cadre of Western development experts that socialist economic planning possessed a broader economic rationale—and one that, with some changes, could be reproduced in the less developed economies (Wilber 1969). While the managerial approach (in both its liberal and Marxist guises) was developed in the North to suit the problems of the North, it was applied without very much hesitation to the problem of underdevelopment in the global South. Although economists generally agreed that the economic issues faced by these countries differed from those theorized by managerialists and economists studying Western Europe and North America, the analyses of Keynes, Tinbergen, Kuznets, and others had a signi‹cant in›uence on development thought. The persuasiveness of their challenge to orthodox laissez-faire economics set the stage for an alternative approach to understanding economics. Arguments in favor of economic management prepared the way for imagining that the public sector could serve as an active and benevolent force in the capitalist development of the national economies of the global South. Keynes’s disciples such as R. Harrod (1939), E. D. Domar (1946), and R. Nurkse (1952) pioneered the extension of Keynesian unemployment theory into long-run growth models that could be applied to the underdeveloped nations. These models were then applied by the planning bureaus instituted by the United Nations all over the developing world. Hirschman suggests that the critique of universalism implicit in early macroeconomic theorizing also laid the groundwork for development economics as a speci‹c sub‹eld of the discipline, in the sense that different kinds of objects, different kinds of national economies (i.e., developing versus industrial), require different kinds of economic policies because of their different national economic structures (1981, 374). Finally, everywhere in the global South local knowledges of the economy were marginalized and displaced as a cadre of devel-

14

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opment planners, armed with their expert vision of the economy as a functional, manageable entity, swept onto the stage. The recurring themes of development—almost all of which emphasized policies based on a view of the economy as a bounded, knowable, manageable space—owe their debt to these innovations in economic thought. Development and Decolonization in the Global South The naturalization of the national space of the economy within the development project is in part a product of changes in economic theory and practice that occurred during the mid–twentieth century. But it is also bound within a wider set of cultural, political, and institutional practices, such as models of development, strategies for accumulation, modes of production and consumption, and so forth that form the “web of interlocution” that has given modern narratives of the nation and economic development their power (Somers 1994, 619). Among these we can include the link between development and the historical moment of decolonization in the mid–twentieth century. Given the contexts of colonial history and international political economy, nationalism emerged as the dominant discourse of development for these newly independent regions after World War II. Whether leading liberal or socialist states, postcolonial elites saw development as the key to gaining true independence for their countries. The task of nation building toward the goal of sovereignty was, however, complicated in these countries by what Chatterjee refers to as a “project of mediation” between the two realms of the nation (1993a, 72). The material realm was conceded to the West in the name of economic modernization. Self-determination was to be pursued through the development of a modern, industrial state. As Jawarharlal Nehru stated in 1961, “the test of a country’s advance is how far it is utilizing modern techniques” (cited in Arndt 1987, 112). At the same time, postcolonial nationalism was de‹ned along lines of preserving the distinctiveness of national culture against that of the former colonizers of Western Europe (Chatterjee 1993a). Thus, the modernist belief that the country needs to modernize and advance in order to gain its independence in the international order was pursued simultaneously with a quest for a national identity based on excavating a traditional past. The idea that the postcolonial nation-state should function as an agent for modernization also represents a challenge to the colonial past even as it provides certain continuities with colonialism’s legacy. At the moment of

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decolonization at the end of World War II, discourses of modernization were already being operationalized in a number of colonial territories. From the late nineteenth century on, the colonial encounter between Great Britain and India and Ceylon was increasingly presented as a different sort of civilizing mission than the one that had characterized the earlier period of colonization. The new mission was characterized by a “progressivist plot into which the modernization narrative inserts it[self]” (Scott 1994, 207; see also Chatterjee 1993b).11 The need for such a mission was framed by imperial forces in terms of the backwardness and inferiority of the colonized. While technological achievement was a major yardstick by which the superiority of Europe was measured (Adas 1989), other aspects of what constituted inferiority differed depending on context. For example, Asian men were “feminized” as small and weak (Chang and Ling 2000), while Africans were viewed as savage and barbaric (Bayart 1993). Writers in economics, too, traded in these narratives of inferiority (and implicit superiority of the West). For instance Keynes, in a letter to the British Treasury from Bretton Woods, writes: Twenty-one countries have been invited which clearly have nothing to contribute and will merely encumber the ground, namely, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominica, Ecuador, Salvador, Guatamala, Haiti, Honduras, Liberia, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Venezuela, Peru, Uruguay, Ethiopia, Iceland, Iran, Iraq, Luxemborg. The most monstrous monkey-house assembled for years. (Moggridge 1980, 42) The supposed backwardness of these regions was unfailingly described by the colonizers as maintaining inef‹ciency and/or unjust systems of power. One issue of great interest on this score was the status of women. “Among rude people women are generally degraded, among civilized people they are exalted,” writes James Mill, one of the most popular promoters of British colonialism in the nineteenth century, in his History of India (cited in Enloe 1989, 48). The social reforms instituted in the name of “civilizing” the colonies were legitimized through narratives of progress that placed Western European nations at the highest level of advancement (an effect of European nationalism) and through denying the existence of civilization in the colonies. In the colonizer’s view modernization would only occur through contact with the modern West (Cowen and Shenton 1995). Independence movements challenged this colonial narrative of progress.

16

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First, in terms of economic development, the colonial powers had not modernized but had rather plundered the global South. In an anti-imperialist move that used Enlightenment discourse as a basis for claims about liberation, independence movements argued that only national sovereignty, not continued colonial exploitation, could create the conditions that would make their countries progressive, industrialized, and modern. And for some of the emerging leaders of newly independent nations, the model to be emulated in the effort to achieve economic empowerment and sovereignty was the model of the West. As Nehru writes: The very thing that India lacked, the modern West possessed and possessed to excess. It had a dynamic outlook. . . . Because it was dynamic, it was progressive and full of life. . . . India, as well as China, must learn from the West for the modern West has much to teach, and the spirit of the age is represented by the West. (1990, 384–85) This strategy of learning from the West was seen as a way to overturn the backwardness that had resulted from the colonial legacy. In an effort to secure and maintain independence, postcolonial elites linked a national model of economic development to a rhetoric of national sovereignty. Adoption of modern technologies and corresponding economic growth would serve as a foundation of national power by allowing these nations to catch up to the West. In addition, state-led development was seen as a way of gaining the support of the people for the postcolonial governments in these new countries, thus guaranteeing some political stability.12 Thus, the logic of national developmentalism conferred legitimacy on the new leaders of these countries by connecting the sovereign powers of the state with the economic well-being of the people within its borders.13 The role of the state in planning and regulating this transformation to modernity was emphasized in postcolonial nationalist rhetoric. Again, continuities and discontinuities with the colonial legacy ‹gure in these early post–World War II nationalist discourses. Many of the apparatuses of government intervention that had been put in place by colonial administrations were inherited by nationalist elites. From the nineteenth century on, colonial bureaucracies had been occupying themselves with classifying populations through surveys, accounts, and censuses. In this most general sense, the idea of governmentality as applied to colonial entities appears similar to the Western European experience described in the preceding section. However, there were important differences between the European and colonial experiences, most obviously the “rule of colonial difference” by

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which the colonized are represented as an inferior Other to the West (Chatterjee 1993b, 19). In Chatterjee’s view, race was the marker of this power. As he states, “the more . . . the processes of government [were pushed] in the direction of a rationalization of administration and the normalization of the objects of its rule, the more insistently did the issue of race come up to emphasize the speci‹cally colonial character of British dominance in India.”14 Thus, a different political rationality dominated the colonial experience of governmentality compared with the European context, in the sense that a gulf based on the “rule of difference” existed between the state and the people, in that colonial constructions of difference included or excluded portions of the native population, and, ‹nally, in terms of what imperialist forces sought to organize and reorganize within the space of the colonial entity (Scott 1994, 197). The level at which classi‹cation and accounting took place under the management of the administrative colonial state in regions such as India and Ceylon illustrates another difference between European and colonial governmentality. There was a relatively great effort expended by the rulers of empire to record and administer economic activity in the colonies. For instance, because of the diverse nature of economic activity in India, standardized accounts were created in the early twentieth century in order to make this information, and thus the colony, legible and therefore manageable by the British (Chatterjee 1993a). Within the context of these practices, we can locate the emergence of the idea of the “Indian economy” as an object of intervention. Such accounts, suggests U. Kalpagam, represent a protomacroeconomic accounting framework that represented the economy in the space of colonial borders and literally constituted entities such as “economy” and “society” (Kalpagam 2000, 51). While precolonial states such as the Mughals had developed systematic record keeping, it was only in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial governance, with its “vast documentation project” (48), that statistical measurements of the economy were constructed and used to manage economic and social space. Twentieth-century colonial regimes were often subject to similar experiments in social engineering (Scott 1998, 97). In some colonial regions, then, an entity analogous to a national economy may have emerged as an object of managerial control twenty or thirty years before such ideas began to take hold of the economic imagination in North American and European economies.15 For example, John Maynard Keynes attempted to measure the circulation of money and its effects on the Indian colonial economy as part of a larger project of colonial economic management while at the India Of‹ce

18

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in London. His work in this regard, which demonstrates a very early version of his later macroeconomic theory, is published in his ‹rst book, Indian Currency and Finance (1913). Nationalists taking power in Asian and African nations often left these apparatuses, and the ideologies that underwrote them, relatively untouched. It was in part against this background that decolonization was accompanied by a rhetoric of state-centered economic and social intervention aimed at modernization, which in turn discredited other non-Western socioeconomic epistemologies (Rabinow 1990; Cooper and Stoler 1997). One of the ironies of postwar decolonization is the extent to which national anticolonial movements took as their object a historic nation that was in fact a territory carved out by imperial conquest (Hobsbawm 1990). These territories were not the ethnic or linguistically homogenous entities taken to be the (false) standard of the nation-as-people in the West. In many countries there coexisted a remarkable diversity of ethnic groups, religions, and languages. The project of nation building for the postcolonial elites, therefore, was one that stressed the need for not only emancipation from the European colonialists but the uni‹cation of a diverse population under the rubric of a single nation/people. To a great extent, the rhetoric of the national development model contributed to the uni‹catory and emancipatory spirit with the powerful idea that the state could lead the nation into an era of economic modernization whose fruits would be enjoyed by an imagined economic community of citizens. Coupling this with an anti-imperialist rhetoric suggested a future of economic self-determination for the uni‹ed people/nation. But as Chatterjee points out: The promise of national emancipation was ful‹lled, if not fraudulently, then certainly by the forcible marginalization of many who were supposed to have shared in the fruits of liberation. The cultural history of nationalism, shaped through its struggle with colonialism, contained many possibilities of authentic, creative and plural development of social identities that were violently disrupted by the political history of the postcolonial state seeking to replicate the modular forms of the modern nation-state. (1993b, 156) Gender, Modernization, and the Imagined Economic Community So, just as with all constructions of the nation, where the space of the imagined community is de‹ned against what lies outside of its boundaries

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(Anderson 1991), the construction of nation, and the national economy, was inclusive of some elements and exclusionary with regard to others. In the postcolonial context, this is partly embodied within notions of progress and modernity in which the newly independent country needed to look “forward” and toward the West to regain its sovereignty and place in the world. Liberal and Marxist nationalist movements, despite their other differences, were in agreement that many ancient customs and arrangements needed to be reformed or scrapped entirely in order to achieve modernity. At times, such notions underwrote the economic marginalization of those whose economic activities were not considered to contribute to this goal. Among these marginalized we can include rural women, who did much in the way of domestic production and subsistence farming, work that was generally not promoted or supported within the economic development strategies of the modernizing nation.16 At the same time that emerging nations were looking forward, they were also looking back to reclaim a past that would both challenge the colonial attacks on local tradition and cement a national identity. Independence led to a process of reexamining not only economic but social values in the construction of the meaning of being, for example, Indian, Kenyan, or Sri Lankan. Acknowledging the ways that civic, ethnic, and cultural nationalisms operated in this context is important for a sustained theorization of postcolonial identity (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989). Still, in whatever form that nationalism took after independence, the process of othering and struggles over inclusion were central to it. While ignored in most mainstream scholarship, gender is a key aspect of this project of national identity construction. The struggle between modernization and tradition within the nation was, and continues to be, written on women’s bodies. Anthias and Yuval-Davis (1989) point to some of the speci‹c links between women and the nation in this regard: as biological reproducers of national citizens, as subjects involved in the transition of national values, as markers of the boundaries between national groups, as signi‹ers of national differences, and as participants in national struggles. There were, for instance, a variety of responses by postcolonial male elites to the colonial characterization of their countries as rude cultures that oppressed women. Some nationalists rearticulated the colonizers “civilizing” efforts in the name of the nationalist revolution. In India, for example, postcolonial nationalists, drawing upon native reform movements dating back almost a hundred years, borrowed from the British policy of banning the practice of widow burning (Mani 1993), while in Iran nationalists maintained the colonial ban on women wearing hijab in public.

20

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On the other hand, a more “traditional” role for women was just as likely to be defended against the degradation of outside forces, including the former imperialists. The rhetoric of nation building relied upon metaphors of family and home. This is a common trope because the nation has often been imagined in terms of metaphors of the family and accordingly has replicated the patriarchy of conventional family forms. Women are viewed as the mothers of the nation, as reproducers rather than producers, as objects of protection rather than agents. The nation symbolizes family relations and the interiority of family life, emphasizing familiarity and security. Women’s role in the home/nation was portrayed through societal ideals of femininity in terms of dress, sexuality, and behavior appropriate for women as the “centers” of homes and the “carriers of tradition” (Papanek 1994, 46). In this context, the cultural construction of the nation played up the importance of “national domesticity” (Luna 1993) in which good women were to provide nurturing and national values to their families, thus contributing to the stability of the public sphere. Different ideals of national domesticity that were often related to class norms reproduced national identities of femininity and masculinity (Pateman 1988; Luna 1993). Jayawardena describes, for instance, how bourgeois liberal leaders tended to rely upon capitalist modernization scripts in this regard. “The women of the peasantry were . . . proletarianized, [while] those of the bourgeoisie were trained to accept new social roles in conformity with the emerging bourgeois ideology of the period” (Jayawardena 1986, 9). The project of mediation that characterized postcolonial nationalism created a “complex inter-relationship of contest and collusion between indigenous patriarchal norms and those held by administrators” (Sangari and Vaid 1993, 7). Struggles over the meaning of women’s place in the nation help us to better understand the alternative visions of national development that animated the discourses and practices of nationalist movements. Shirin Rai’s (1999) analysis of the Indian independence movement’s National Congress is instructive here. She discusses the debates that took place in one of the subcommittees of the Congress’s National Planning Committee on “Women’s Role in the Planned Economy” in the late 1930s. This subcommittee, inspired by the concerns of Indian feminists, focused particularly on the goal of equal opportunities for women in the new nation as a way to resolve existing inequalities. As Rai argues, the emancipation of the “individual woman” took center stage in these discussions. The subcommittee generally represented “the social” as a set of backward customs and traditions that needed to be overcome so that individual

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women could participate fully as “useful citizen(s)” in the new nation. The postindependence nation was represented as the only social force that could liberate Indian women. However, as Rai points out, there were tensions in the subcommittee regarding these discussions about the role of women. Custom and tradition were on the one hand viewed as brakes on India’s ability to liberate women and modernize the nation. But the subcommittee was also concerned with maintaining customs and traditions and argued that it was not critical of those traditions that contributed to the dignity of Indian women in ways that helped to retain the spiritual elements of Indian identity (242). The ‹gure of the woman is thus simultaneously associated with modernization and tradition. Women are markers of progress and a key link to the past that gives India its identity, symbols of India’s modernization to the rest of the world yet symbols of interiority–within the closed, protected space of the nation/family. These struggles over the place of women in the nation help us to understand the different views of nationalist development that were circulating during the period and the complex nature of the nationalist modernization project. Feminist challenges to the colonial legacy in the name of the nationalist cause, and then to the postcolonial nationalist elites’ view of gender and the imagined community of the nation, varied signi‹cantly from place to place. The moment of decolonization and the ‹rst wave of nation building, however, did create a space for women’s voices on such concerns to be heard and formed the basis of continued struggle and renegotiation over women’s place in the national community. The roots of Third World feminism can be traced to women’s participation in nationalist movements (Jayawardena 1986, 23). The response of national elites to colonial representations and treatment of women opened up new possibilities for feminists to participate in debates on women’s social roles, including their roles in the economy, and to propose alternatives. However, postcolonial nationalism also posed a major challenge to feminists. In particular, the emphasis on unity, for instance in presenting a united opposition to the imperialist forces, made it easy for feminist concerns that did not ‹t the male agenda to be labeled “particularistic” and for their concerns to be dismissed as marginal to the real struggle for sovereignty and the greater good of the nation. Women’s participation in anticolonial political movements gave them a place in the public arena of the nation. But the construction of national identity around the tropes of family and home sometimes led to an acceptance of dominant gender roles that limited women’s social citizenship.

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These gendered political tropes ‹nd their counterpart in the discourse of economic development. The masculinist biases of economics have long linked ideas about markets and rationality to men, and household and irrationality to women (Barker and Kuiper 2003, 11). Development economics carried forth and extended these ideas. Implicit assumptions about woman’s appropriate place as wife and mother, which limited her to the private sphere of the household, often pervaded the texts of development economics. These assumptions played an important role in shaping arguments and policies through the 1980s, frequently to the detriment of women’s economic and social status (Elson 1995; Moser 1993; Kabeer 1994). Economic development was imagined to take place in the public sphere of the market as opposed to the private sphere of the household, which was not viewed as a site of production but rather an “economy of affection” (Scott 1995, 18). Often the household, and women’s role in it, was presented as the complimentary opposite of the modern, male world, and development policies were geared toward teaching women about nutrition, cleanliness, and raising children. This approach to understanding women’s role in the economy made invisible workers out of those women who did not ‹t the colonial and patriarchal stay-at-home mom de‹nitions of development economists (Escobar 1995a, 170–72; Boserup 1970). While women’s role in the household was sometimes presented as a complement to modernization initiatives, it was also treated as an obstacle in a process of “modernizing in opposition to a feminized and traditional household” (Scott 1995, 5). Tradition, while important to postcolonial nation builders, was a much more fraught concept in the dualistic framework of development economics and its mantra of marketization, monetization, and modernization. The traditional sector was seen to be the cause of economic backwardness, something to be transformed through the development process. The household, as a stronghold of tradition, was viewed by many early development economists with suspicion. The Third World woman was often portrayed as the most backward in her society, “ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented” (Mohanty 1991, 56), who could only be empowered by integration into the capitalist labor market. The trouble with tradition did not mean that the trope of the family was rejected by economists. At the microeconomic level, economists have relied upon constructions of the family as a cohesive collective with shared values and goals. Development’s presentation of the nation as an imagined community of shared economic interests has relied upon metaphors of

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national-community-as-family, and these metaphors of cohesiveness and harmony also have gendered implications. Often these discursive moves are not made explicit, but sometimes they are spelled out quite clearly. For example, Paul Samuelson, in describing a social indifference curve that could represent the collective preferences of a national economy in terms of different policy choices, uses the analogy of family decision making, in which the family acts as a single, harmonious unit despite the diverse individual preferences of its members. Like the family, which makes decisions based on the collective good in a fairly harmonious manner, a nation can make decisions based on standards of collective well-being (Samuelson 1956). Feminist scholars have pointed out the ways that mainstream narratives of family cohesiveness at the microeconomic level ignore the existence of power and struggle within the family (Hartmann 1981; Nelson 1996). Similarly, social indifference curves and other economic representations of national harmony based on the metaphor of the family tend to marginalize the existence of power and con›ict at the macroeconomic level, including gender power and con›ict (Bergeron 1996). While national development sometimes created opportunities for women to use the universal construction of the citizen to their advantage, it also framed those opportunities through a masculinist lens. The result of this emphasis on social cohesion and unity was a rhetoric of national economic development that tended to push women’s so-called particularistic concerns (as well as the concerns of others, such as subaltern men, whose political and economic agendas do not ‹t the dominant national scripts) to the margins. Sovereignty and Economic Nationalism The emphasis on social cohesion and unity in newly emerging nations was bolstered by another key narrative of national development, that of sovereignty and national self-determination. Using a rhetoric of the universal rights of nations, many political leaders in the global South made arguments about decolonization and, after independence, advocated policy regimes based on a concept of the nation as a uni‹ed “self” that had the right to develop in its own manner. The wave of interest in nation forming and national self-determination coalesced with liberal Enlightenment notions of freedom and progress after World War II (Eley and Suny 1996). As Chatterjee (1993a) puts it, this often represented a derivative discourse in which nationalist anti-imperialist projects embraced the core idea of

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Western modernity, that each individual is an autonomous subject with rational control over his or her fate, and extended it to the nation-state— all in the name of breaking free from the West. The relationship between sovereignty and economic development that was used by liberation movements and, later, postcolonial government leaders, also resonated with many economists writing in the mid–twentieth century. Ideas about the relationship between sovereignty and freedom on the one hand, and economic development and growth on the other, were at the core of both liberal and Marxist modernization theories. The rhetoric of sovereignty was complicated. Arguments that each nation had the right to choose its own development path were put forth by postcolonial nationalists and development economists in the same breath as arguments that claimed that most of the countries of the global South had not yet achieved a level of development that allowed them to experience such sovereignty (at least in an economic sense). And, as Ashis Nandy (1983) has pointed out, the goal of catching up to the modern West in order to achieve national economic sovereignty is often framed in both liberal and socialist discourses through an adult/child metaphor, in which the less developed countries have not quite achieved a state of mature economic development. Thus, at the same time that “sovereignty” became a catchword for the universal rights of nations, it also became an idea through which notions of difference among nations emerged. National identity was a central theme in discussions of self-determination and sovereignty. Midcentury development thought was characterized by a “search for national development” that coupled the managerial imagination described in the preceding with the twentieth-century ideal of national self-determination (Wallerstein 1992, 528). While generally an implicit subtext of mainstream development approaches, at times the idea of national sovereignty was explicitly addressed by liberal modernizers. For instance, W. W. Rostow contends that government should promote the sorts of changes that could yield what he calls the “non-economic aspects of the drive to maturity,” which include “nationalism” as a “powerful motive force” for modernization—as he puts it, “at least as important as the pro‹t motive” (1960, 26 and 29). Here Rostow is clearly referring to the drive for national self-determination and autonomy as a major impetus for modernization. While such thinking animated the ideas of modernization stalwarts such as Rostow, it characterized the approach of those who were more critical of market-led approaches, and they often relied upon Enlightenment

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narratives of autonomy and self-determination to support their political and economic programs as well. In this section I focus on one of the most frequently cited examples of writing that explicitly links national sovereignty with economic development, that of Raúl Prebisch and others working at the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). The ideas generated by ECLA in the immediate post–World War II period grew out of a detailed empirical analysis of Latin American economies and centered around an argument that while nations in the region had gained political sovereignty during the nineteenth century, the goal of economic sovereignty had been elusive. The industrialized economies had played an “active role” in determining the economic path of Latin American economies, while the underdeveloped countries had in turn played a “passive” or “re›exive” role (ECLA 1950, 17). If Latin America was to develop, it would have to break out of this dynamic by renegotiating its links with the world economy. Each nation would have to become self-determining in order to achieve economic sovereignty. ECLA’s ideas about the nature of imperialism and the importance of delinking from the world economy had roots that stretched back to nineteenth-century debates in Latin American political economy, but they were also grounded in the recent historical experience of Latin America. Prior to the Great Depression, the economies of the region had been oriented toward exporting primary products to U.S. and European markets. The sharp decline in demand for these products during the 1930s spelled economic disaster for many of these economies, and policymakers began to take a different road by encouraging import-substituting industrialization during the depression and subsequent war years (Arndt 1987). The theory of economic change in the region put forth by ECLA social scientists revolved around the relationship between trade and development. Prebisch argued that the terms of trade in the world economy were biased against countries that specialized in primary goods such as food and raw materials. Since the majority of nations in the global South traded in primary products, the results indicated that they would become impoverished if they pursued a free-trade approach to development. Jagdish Bhagwati (1958), using a more neoclassical approach, came to much the same conclusion. Prebisch and other development thinkers working out these analyses of sovereignty, dependency, and protectionism were in›uenced in part by the writings of Friedrich List. List, a nineteenth-century economic nationalist, was a critic of the classical economic case that free trade among nations would make all countries better off due to a more ef‹cient global division

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of labor. According to free-trade advocates such as Ricardo, countries should specialize in the production of the good in which they have a comparative advantage. List, in contrast, worried that a free-trade approach would exacerbate existing inequalities between nations and that the industrialized economies would gain the upper hand (List 1837, 126–27). Because of this, List advocated a policy of economic protectionism until the less advanced nations had caught up to the more advanced ones. Only at the point where all nations of the world were on more or less the same footing would free trade be bene‹cial for all trading partners (174–75).17 The core of List’s critique was not so much a policy question as a question of how one theorized about the economy. The problem with freetrade approaches, List argued, was that they focused only on the individual and the welfare of the world as a whole but failed to take into account the importance of the nation in economic analysis: Between each individual and entire humanity, however, stands the nation, with its special language and literature, with its peculiar origin and history, with its special manners and customs, laws and institutions, with the claims of all of these for existence, independence, perfection and continuance for the future, and with its separate territory. (List 1837, 174) Like List, economists such as Prebisch who advocated a protectionist approach to development in the postwar era relied on a conception of the national economy as a collective whole, an identity, and felt that the state should direct the economy for the good of the nation and the people. The goal, in this particular case, was to achieve a level of modernization that would allow each nation to become a truly autonomous, self-de‹ning agent within the world economy. Thus protectionism was not the core of their thinking about the economy. That position was taken by the notion of national economic sovereignty. The ECLA social scientists and many others advocating some form of protectionism were doing so in order to get their countries to the point where they had achieved a level of development that put them on equal footing with the countries of North America and Europe. Once that was achieved, it was argued, protectionism and other forms of delinking from the global economy would no longer be necessary. Thus, the economic nationalist policies advocated by Prebisch and others should not be misunderstood as simply protectionism and state planning but rather as a piece of a broader framework of nationalism based on concepts of national identity and sovereignty.

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The concept of economic nationalism that has animated discussions of sovereignty and development has unfortunately been frequently misunderstood in the literature. In part this is due to the fact that the term “economic nationalism” is more often used by its opponents as a pejorative to de‹ne anything that does not ‹t economic liberalism (Heilperin 1960). For example, the free-market liberal trade theorist Harry Johnson de‹nes economic nationalism as state control of economic activity, trade restrictions, comprehensive planning, and “domestic participation in or control of the ownership of foreign enterprises” (1967, 128–30). Of course, notions of sovereignty in popular discourse are overlapping and multiple—as Federico Reyes Heroles puts it, “sovereignty as a state ethic, as a political instrument, actual sovereignty and sovereignty as a popular emotion cross over one another and mix together, creating confusion” (cited in Kingsolver 2001, 35). So it is perhaps not surprising that historians of economic thought, attempting to grapple with such an unwieldy term, would offer imprecise, confusing accounts. Recently scholars on economic nationalism have come up with a more precise de‹nition of the term, one that breaks from the conventional accounts that associate the term strictly with state-centric economic policies. These scholars view economic nationalism as a set of policies that results from a shared national identity (Helleiner 2002). This de‹nition moves us away from the simplistic and confusing focus on state intervention found in accounts such as Johnson’s, which have wrongly con›ated antiliberal policies such as mercantilism and protectionism with nationalism by focusing on the state instead of the nation. For example, R. Abdelal’s (2001) account of how scholars have confused economic nationalism with state-centrism in post-Soviet states contends that what they are describing is a state as an actor with interests distinct from society and therefore not nationalism. Instead of a focus on state interests, he argues that economic nationalism should apply to the in›uence of national identities on economic thinking and policy-making. Eric Helleiner (2002), in a similar vein, reexamines the writings of List to demonstrate that his ideas about nationalism, and thus the meaning of the term, have been misunderstood. While most writers link List’s economic nationalism with a particular set of policy prescriptions such as tariffs to protect vulnerable countries, Helleiner shows that it is a more inclusive idea of national identity that animates List’s thinking. A major point raised in all of this new scholarship on economic nationalism is that economists’ and political theorists’ views of economic nationalism are muddled, and because of that they fail to see that it is a much more pervasive discourse and not one simply associated with socialism or

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government intervention. However, with the more precise and expanded de‹nition, economic nationalism can be seen at work in liberal economic agendas as well as interventionist ones. For instance, some nineteenth-century nationalist leaders in Latin America linked free trade with the goal of national sovereignty, in part because trade restrictions were associated negatively with the colonial experience (Quijano 2000). British support for free trade in the nineteenth century represented a form of economic nationalism in the sense that it re›ected a set of values, such as liberty, freedom, and national progress, that was associated with British national identity. As F. Trentmann puts it: Britain’s free trade vision was sustained by a contrast between British progress and civilization and foreign reaction and backwardness. . . . In the close connection between national identity and free trade, political economy molded collective consciousness through a diametric opposition between idealized British virtues and traditions and “false” and degenerate foreign cultures. (1998, 231) And the British argument for free trade was certainly viewed as a particular kind of economic nationalism by the leaders of countries who were its targets: It is very beautiful . . . to speak of free trade. . . . this word freedom is so beautiful! But we must understand freedom. For the English who favors free trade, freedom is: allow English factories to manufacture the foreign products; allow the English merchant to sell the foreign product. This type of freedom transforms the rest of the world into tributary countries; while England is the only nation that enjoys freedom, the remainder are tributary nations. (Speech by Finance Minister Ru‹no Varela in the Argentine legislature in 1876, cited in Grosfoguel 2000, 362). A broadened perspective on economic nationalism can take all these different instances of its use into account and move us beyond a simplistic view of economic nationalism as government intervention. Economic nationalism in the sense of shared identity of an imagined community can be associated with economic theories of various political stripes, from free traders to those who are in favor of strict controls on foreign goods and capital. The one thing that all of these political positions share by approaching the

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nation-state in such a manner is a rhetoric that contributes to the conditions in which developmentalist ideology ›ourishes. While some recommend free trade, and others suggest a more interventionist route, all economic nationalists (whether they take the title willingly or not) believe in national development and in the teleological progress of the nation-state through its rational organization (Helleiner 2002).18 Conclusion A number of overlapping narratives of the nation contributed to the discourse of development that emerged after World War II. This was the result of a convergence of a number of forces that de‹ned the national economy as an imagined community, one that functioned as both a space of economic regulation and a collectivity of shared economic interests. Among these forces was the conceptualization of the nation as an object of knowledge within twentieth-century managerial discourses of the economy. The metaphor of the nation as a cohesive collective is an object of development that is also found within a variety of discourses that link development to national economic sovereignty. With the wave of decolonization that occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s, emerging nations crafted postcolonial national identities in which the nation came to be represented as an acting subject within a global system that contains competing or hostile forces. These representations of the nation as a cohesive community were tied to notions of national identity that, in the context of the postwar political economy, were also compatible with various rhetorics of economic nationalism. These various forces came together to constitute a web of interlocution that gave the modern narratives of the national economy, and thus development thought itself, much of its persuasive power. But there was also tension among these forces and narratives. Presentations of the nation as an object of expert management did not always ‹t easily with rhetorics of sovereignty and self-determination. And the cohesiveness and boundaries of the imagined economic community were the subjects of negotiation and renegotiation as different social movements questioned the gendered, classed, and raced character of national development theories and policies. While the following chapters demonstrate the various ways that these representations of the nation supported mainstream development agendas, no small attention is paid to the tensions and contradictions associated with these representations in development thought.

T WO

Mapping Modernization and Growth Why choose state units at all? Since they do not always constitute self-contained economic systems, the unit chosen is not necessarily a natural one, i.e., one that would be de‹ned by a student delimiting an economic region. A great deal of arbitrariness and historical accident, and a marked absence of historical continuity, may characterize the territorial composition of any given sovereign state. True, every sovereign state attempts to inculcate a feeling of unity and continuity in its citizens. But should economic science further such attempts by accepting those doctrines at their face value, couching all its discourse in terms of statewide economies, and making its basic estimates in terms of national totals, i.e., totals for the relatively arti‹cial boundaries of states? —Simon Kuznets, National Income and Its Composition Our subject matter is growth, not distribution. —W. Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth

Legibility and Development Economics In his book Seeing like a State, James Scott provides a new way of thinking about modernization in the twentieth century, especially as regards to certain attempts by governments to transform their societies. Examining such disparate cases as Soviet planning, Tanzanian villagization, managed forestry in Germany, and the urban-planning experiment of Brasília, Scott shows the similarities among these politically varied projects. These include the value they placed on making society “legible,” or utilizing social simpli‹cations that make a society appear to be more administratively manageable, and their marginalization of local knowledges that might challenge these managerial orderings. One of the key metaphors that Scott 30

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uses in his analysis of modern projects of legibility is the image of the map. In Scott’s use of the metaphor, the state takes on the role of the mapmaker, and the landscape being described is the national civil society. States have used their “maps”—which for Scott includes social statistics and models as well as representations of physical space—as part of ambitious, often utopian projects of social change that have generally been motivated by the best of intentions. But these good intentions are frequently overshadowed by what Scott calls an ideology of high modernism: “envisioning a sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition” (1998, 88). Seeing like a state, Scott argues, does not simply describe, but transforms. It entails an attempt at creating a population with the characteristics that will be easiest to monitor and manage. Projects standardized on the goal of legibility cannot take into account those peoples and activities that fail to ‹t their model; thus they are left out of the frame. And, as Arturo Escobar (1995a) argues in Encountering Development, legibility also means turning those who don’t ‹t the frame into anomalies or pathologies that need to be transformed. Whether ignoring certain populations and practices, eliminating others (for instance displacing whole communities to make way for dam-building projects in India), or labeling particular practices and peoples as pathologies and then attempting to correct them, this homogenizing, abstract vision has resulted far too frequently in loss of freedom, social dislocation, alienation, and environmental degradation aside from whether the outcome resulted in a success or failure as measured by its intended consequences. Scott’s critique of social engineering is by now a familiar one to readers of late twentieth-century social theory. In the 1950s and 1960s, the philosopher Karl Popper and the free-market economist Friedrich Hayek developed in›uential criticisms of utopian engineering projects, and by now there is a rich legacy of critique from Left to Right, modernist to postmodernist currents, that Scott was able to call upon in developing his analysis. It is Scott’s connecting up of social engineering projects on the one hand and the desire for legibility and intelligibility on the other that represents his distinctive addition to the literature. Among other things, Scott’s focus on legibility as a key aspect of modernist projects gives us a different angle of vision for understanding the role that economic theory has played in the development and deployment of certain high-modernist social experiments. As discussed in the last chapter, the twentieth century marked the “discovery” of the economy of each

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nation-state as a particular sort of rei‹ed, legible object, separate from the state and subject to intelligible description using scienti‹c methods. This new conception of the economy-as-legible-object contributed to the emerging discourse of development. Some of the aspects of its relationship to particular aspects of modernist social engineering can be traced out by examining the ‹rst couple of decades of development, the 1950s and 1960s, when the enthusiasm for facilitating rapid change in the name of modernizing the global South was still high and development economics, such as the modernization and growth theories that are the subject of the present chapter, served a particular form of regulation. Economic theory, as Scott notes, contributes to “state simpli‹cations” by making people’s economic activities more legible and thus more readily understood and managed by experts (1998, 3). Jack Amariglio and David Ruccio (1994) have made a similar argument regarding the ways in which the structure of economic thought can have an impact on the economic imagination. Modern economics, they argue, prefers stories that emphasize order, centering, and certainty. Economists tend toward those theories that portray economic outcomes as orderly as opposed to chaotic; that describe economies and individuals as centered, meaning that they convey singleminded rationality and are not the product of individual or societal con›ict; and that tend to portray knowledge (of economic actors as well as economic theorists) as certain and reliable. This angle of vision provides a powerful argument for moving away from standard Whig histories of economic thought and toward an examination of the ways that twentieth-century economic theorists have pursued orderliness and legibility in the service of modernist quests—pursuits that have framed economic knowledge in ways that tend to misrepresent complexities and ignore knowledges and practices that do not ‹t its particular rationality. That is precisely the angle of vision that is taken in this chapter, which focuses on the economic growth theories that underwrote development planning and modernization schemes in the ‹rst two decades of development after World War II. With their goal of rapid social transformation and faith in authoritative intervention, economic growth theories embody the particular sort of modernism that Scott describes as being characteristic of many twentieth-century attempts at creating social change. Development, as de‹ned in its formative years, included the transformation of nearly every aspect of a society, encompassing agrarian reform, industrialization, the creation of an effective state, economic planning, reduction of social inequalities, and dramatic cultural and social transformation.

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Labeled as a “Report by a Group of Experts,” including W. Arthur Lewis and Theodore Schultz, the 1951 United Nations publication Measures for Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries provides a typical example of the scope and exuberance of development thought at this time.1 “Economic progress depends to a large extent upon the adoption by governments of appropriate administrative and legislative action, both in the public and private sector,” the report argues (17). The need for development is framed in terms of the technological backwardness of the underdeveloped economies: “In certain ‹elds of production, some of these countries have made no improvements in technology for centuries. In some parts of the Middle East, for example, agricultural techniques are not better today than they were in the times of the Pharaohs” (28). The backwardness of the underdeveloped world is contrasted with the “remarkable progress of science” in the West, and the resulting gap in technology between the two sectors is decried. The existence of this gap in technology, however, “itself presents the under-developed countries with a wide scope for advance in this ‹eld.” Such an effort was not thought to be easy, or without costs: There is a sense in which rapid economic progress is impossible without painful readjustments. Ancient philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have to disintegrate; bonds of caste, creed and race have to be burst; and large numbers of persons who cannot keep up with progress have to have their expectations of a comfortable life frustrated. Very few communities are willing to pay the full price of rapid economic progress. (15) Yet despite all of these “painful readjustments” that those who “cannot keep up with progress” will have to make, the authors exhort the leaders of underdeveloped nations to encourage the right preferences for their countries, to “inspire the masses with an enthusiasm for progress which carries all before it” (16). Economic development theories in the immediate postwar era placed a high premium on legibility, on mapping the developing country economy as an intelligible object that could be administered by state-planning authorities. In part, this was a re›ection of wider processes of representation occurring in the social sciences in general and economics in particular. At midcentury, a whole battery of experts set out to record economic statistics and map out economic interactions through econometric models, plans, and even more imaginative methods. For example, A. W. Phillips

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developed a hydraulic model of the economy that captured the relationships between savings, investment, money supply, and government spending through ›ows of colored water, the levels of which represented the effects of changes in any of these factors. Again, in the example of the 1951 United Nations “Report by a Group of Experts,” we ‹nd at work the discourse of governmentality discussed in the previous chapter: the developing country economy is presented as a self-contained and legible integrated whole, subject to the appropriate intervention of government authorities. The authors unquestionably advocate planning and point out that the ‹rst stage of planning should be a survey that maps the economy and that all plans should be based on a comprehensive analysis of the interrelations of the economy within the space of the nation-state (67). This assumes without question that these entities are in fact mappable and leaves aside the question of whether their different aspects might not be interrelated in ways that could be subject to authoritative planning. The economy-asobject being discussed in the text is assumed implicitly to coincide with the boundaries of the nation-state, which is deeply connected to the idea that national planning has the potential to transform this object. While acknowledging that international forces such as aid and investment can have some impact, the report lays the burden for underdevelopment heavy on the internal structures of the countries of the global South and locates the solution to the problem of underdevelopment largely within the management of the economic affairs within these boundaries. The report’s suggestions for classifying information and creating maps of economic activity and interactions are, of course, not warranted for their merely descriptive potential. They are directly linked to the prescriptive dictates of development because the economy represents a self-contained system that can be understood and managed by government planning authorities to achieve the goal of modernization. In addition to their emphasis on legibility, modernization and growth theories traded in narratives that downplayed potential con›icts within the imagined community of the national economy, for instance through the use of collective statistical representations of economic well-being such as national income accounts. As Michael P. Cowen and Robert Shenton put it, post–World War II development economics was based on a marriage of science and state direction “to secure the basis of social harmony through national development” (1995, 445). Throughout the report is a narrative of the nation as a cohesive collective, a unity with its own preferences for progress,

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and an entity that will collectively enjoy the fruits of development. For example, the authors contend that in order for development to occur, “the people of a country must desire progress” (United Nations 1951, 13). This desire for progress can take many forms. Different preferences will lead countries to different levels of economic development (13–16). Throughout, nations are discussed as uni‹ed subjects whose different “preferences” would then lead to different levels of economic development, which all in the country (except, as quoted in the preceding, those who “cannot keep up with progress”) would share. As discussed in the previous chapter and elaborated in more detail in the following, these representations of the nation as a cohesive collective also contribute to the narratives of orderliness that made economic planning an exercise in legibility. The extent to which these theories translated into practice, of course, is in›uenced by a number of other factors, including the nature of the market, the capacities of the state, other discourses and agendas, and the interests of various social groups and actors. But economic theory had a wide-ranging impact on the development imaginary, and economists’ visions of national economies as legible, manageable units characterized by a harmony of interests had real effects on people’s lives. While using Scott’s basic framework regarding the relationship between legibility and modernist social practice as a jumping-off point, the account of economic development theory offered in this chapter moves in a slightly different direction. Scott concedes that the state is not the exclusive agent of social engineering and even acknowledges that markets, particularly large corporations, have been agents of similar sorts of high modernism (1998, 7–8), but his concern with the failures of high modernism is limited to a critique of the state, and at certain points in his analysis he counterposes the modernism of the state with the “practical knowledge” of the market. By obscuring the mutually constituted nature of state and market, he fails to create a way for us to make sense of the fact that certain projects are the result of high-modernist visions shared by both states and markets. As discussed in the previous chapter, the emergence of the national economy as an object of development in the mid–twentieth century was not simply the outcome of state actors and logics. Rather it relied upon concepts developed within the modern corporation, such as the idea that technical expertise and management is the path to progress. Taylorist ideas about scienti‹c management and, more generally, the corporate model of planning were applied in contexts as diverse as Vladimir Lenin’s economic

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plans in the Soviet Union, theories of macroeconomic modeling emanating from British and American universities, and the ‹rst U.S. Council of Economic Advisors. Abstract, homogenizing knowledge is not only state knowledge, nor is practical knowledge limited to the market as suggested in Scott’s treatment. Related to this is the fact that in the context of development the very goal of state planning has been to create markets where none had previously existed. Monetization and marketization have been the mantra of development economics since its inception. Thus the framework developed in the previous chapter and carried through into this one imagines Scott’s project of “seeing like a state” as one that in fact transcends the state because it is a process in which the state and market are complexly, mutually constituted. The second way that the present study deviates from Scott’s account of high modernism is in its emphasis on examining (1) the ways that the normal science of economic development and growth theory, and what Scott would call its “thin simpli‹cations,” have been challenged and (2) how development economists have responded to these challenges. I focus on two particular moments of theoretical tension and change inside growth and modernization theory. Both have to do with interventions that challenged the unity of the national economy and, in certain ways, threatened its legibility in the process. The ‹rst of these is the critique of the one-sector Harrod-Domar growth model and its replacement with more sophisticated multisector models. The second of these has been referred to as the “dethronement of GNP.” For a brief moment in the late 1960s and 1970s, development economists’ twenty-year ‹xation with growth was interrupted due to a rising concern that increasing GNP did not bene‹t everyone in the nation but rather had differential effects. The result was that development’s ‹xation on growth and cohesive community was temporarily replaced by an emphasis on inequality and difference. In both of these contexts, I focus on a set of challenges to the modernization agenda voiced by internal liberal critics who were themselves often responding to criticisms being voiced by development’s Others—groups such as rural women, indigenous communities, and other peoples who were being ignored, eliminated, and/or de‹ned as pathological and thus ready to be ‹xed by development planning. While showing the discursive containment of such challenges, I also demonstrate that mainstream development economists’ responses to criticisms of modernization and growth theory did in fact create some small space for alternative perspectives and practices.

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Development Planning and Ways of Seeing As described in chapter 1, mid–twentieth century economic thought was characterized by an emerging technocratic vision of the economy. In part this was a response to the failures of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury neoclassical thought, especially its emphasis on the self-regulating nature of the market. Neoclassical economists, armed with the assumption of rational action, posited that market exchanges undertaken by rational, calculating economic agents would result in allocative and technical ef‹ciency. The neoclassical world was modeled on the idea of Jean-Baptiste Say’s law, “supply creates its own demand,” which can be understood in the following two senses. At the general level of economic activity, production generates incomes that are in turn spent on what is produced. Second, if there are shortages or surpluses in particular markets, suppliers can create demand for their products by adjusting prices back to market clearing. All markets, including the labor market, would clear in this general equilibrium scenario, with ef‹cient methods of production, based on choices that are rational responses to price data, in use in every sector. But neoclassical predictions of full employment and ef‹cient outcomes were challenged by the economic crises and transformations of the early twentieth century, particularly the Great Depression of the 1930s. In his General Theory, Keynes explains that the free market, if left to its own devices, could result in nonmarket clearing outcomes of unemployment and low investment because of imperfect information and uncertainty in economic decision making. As G. L. S. Shackle has argued, Keynes’s insight, and those of other thinkers of the time working in a similar mode, led to a sea change in economic thinking: “Until the 1930s, economics was a science of coping with basic scarcity. After the 1930s, it was an account of how men cope with scarcity and uncertainty” (Shackle 1967, 7). Amariglio (1990) has suggested that the incorporation of imperfect information and uncertainty in economic theory in the 1930s and 1940s created a space for challenging the modernist narratives of order in economics. However, he argues, economic theory needs to be also understood in terms of its attempts to contain these elements. With the existence of uncertainty, imperfect knowledge, and resulting less-than-optimal outcomes, economic realities were acknowledged by economists writing in the 1930s and 1940s to be much more complicated than previously imagined. But if uncertainty in the knowledge of economic agents was recognized, the uncertainty of the economic knowledge of economists was not. Instead,

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Keynes and many of his disciples believed that if they made their theories that much more sophisticated, they could capture the logic of the economy in a way that would allow it to be managed technocratically by state functionaries armed with expert economic knowledge. While Keynes opened the door to more radical institutional approaches, mathematization and universalistic model building were the order of the day once the dust settled on the Keynesian revolution (Crotty 1990). As Escobar puts it, the Keynesian challenge to neoclassical economics eventually resulted in “a new emphasis on public policy and planning . . . to ‹ll the need for mechanisms of order and control” (1995a, 69). Keynes himself never focused on the problem of underdevelopment, but Keynesianism and its ideal of technocratic management were a great in›uence on development thought, and the Keynesian-inspired growth economics that dominated development in the years after World War II was elaborated within these same terms of rationality, order, and control. The in›uence is seen in Harrod’s (1939) extension of Keynes’s model for the explanation of unemployment into a model of self-sustaining economic growth. Using Keynesian insights regarding the role of savings and investment in the macroeconomy, Harrod places his emphasis on how the growth of ‹xed capital will generate suf‹cient pro‹ts to maintain investment and thus promote a dynamic process of national economic growth. A growth rate stimulated by increasing capital investment, he argues, would be greater and more consistent than the rather unpredictable “natural” growth rate made possible by increases in population and the rate of technical advance. Harrod’s insights were combined with Domar’s (1946) to create the Harrod-Domar model. This model became one of the most in›uential frameworks for planning economic growth in development thought and contributed to the almost exclusive emphasis on capital-intensive investment as the key to development from the early 1950s to the early 1970s. The major theoretical insight of this model was specifying how incremental additions to the growth of capital investment contributed to the growth of overall output in the economy. It assumed that the attainable growth rate depended on two things. The ‹rst was the proportion of production that the planners could get from the economy via saving. The second was the capital/output ratio, or the amount of additional output that could be obtained per unit of investment given a choice of potential products. This provided a framework for consistently planning economic growth because the attainable growth rate would depend on (1) the percentage of total pro-

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duction that the planners could extract from the economy as savings and (2) the amount of additional output that could be obtained per unit of investment as determined by the planner’s choice of investment projects. The model in its simplest form links the target level of GDP with the marginal or incremental capital/output ratio. The capital/output ratio is assumed to be constant through a range of production and calculated for each different country based on estimates from historical data. However, these historical data were often made sense of in a way that would lend itself to the assumptions of the model, such as a one-good, one-product national economy (in which economists calculated one average rate of productivity for the entire nation) and a closed economy. Full employment equilibrium is also assumed, for growth is not a process of moving toward production possibilities but rather expanding them. The basic model was developed for the industrial economies but came to be applied to both developed and underdeveloped countries. In the latter case, the cause of underdevelopment was theorized as a lack of suf‹cient capital for investment; thus the strategy that needed to be pursued included ‹lling the savings gap. It was assumed that closing this gap by providing the right amount of capital given the country’s incremental capital/output ratio would produce the desired growth rate. Many development economists believed that the ‹rst step to growth was to increase the savings rate in order to close this gap. Lewis, for instance, argues: The central problem in the theory of economic growth is to understand the process by which a community is converted from being a 5 percent to a 12 percent saver—with all the changes in attitudes, institutions and techniques which accompany this conversion. (1958, 225–26) Lewis’s policy prescription, it should be noted, is aimed at increasing the savings rate by redistributing income and shifting resources from the traditional sector of labor-intensive agriculture to the modern sector of industrialized production of agricultural and manufactured goods in order to increase savings and improve productivity. Using a classical labor surplus approach, he advocates increasing ef‹ciency in agriculture and then pulling surplus labor out of the countryside, or what he calls the “subsistence sector,” and into the cities, thus urbanizing and modernizing the national economy. Surplus labor would be drawn from the countryside and into the

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“capitalist” sector, which offers higher wages than those available in the subsistence sector. The ability to generate enough capital and thus technological development in order to grow the capitalist sector is, however, dependent on some initial skewing of the distribution of income toward the upper or “saving” class, according to Lewis, because only this class would provide the funds for investment. The justi‹cation for this initial redistribution to the rich was eventual long-term growth that would bene‹t the entire nation, referred to in Lewis’s quote as the “community” that chooses to be transformed into a saving nation. The hardship and resistance associated with these efforts at transforming traditional agricultural communities was not unrecognized by development theorists such as Lewis. However, these tensions disappear in his rhetoric of the national economy as an imagined community. Shrinking the so-called traditional sector and growing the industrial sector was the goal of nearly all early development theories, but this was viewed as only a partial approach to the speci‹c problem of funding growth. Augmenting domestic savings with massive injections of foreign aid, loans, or private foreign investment was also recommended. But in any case, all theories based on this approach saw capital investment as the centerpiece of the development strategy—‹lling the “lack” that caused underdevelopment in the ‹rst place–and the goal of development as increasing the country’s national income. Majid Rahnema (1992) has written that the way of seeing the global South as underdeveloped in the early post–World War II period was closely bound with a rhetoric of difference that constructed entire nations as either advanced and rich or backwards and poor and that this aspect of the emerging discourse of development relied upon the relatively new concept of national income as a measure for expressing stages of economic development.2 Rahnema cites a 1948 World Bank report as one of the ‹rst examples of a comparative statistical approach that correlated poverty with individual countries’ GNPs.3 In this report a nation that had less than one hundred dollars per capita GNP was poor and underdeveloped; countries with higher per capita GNPs were considered to be at higher stages of development. Such typologies of nations as rich and poor have by now become so common in the development literature that we do not generally give them a second thought. But such representations, Rahnema points out, literally create subjectivities. The adoption of comparative GNP statistics at the end of World War II marked “the ‹rst time in history entire nations came to be considered (and considered themselves) as poor” (Rah-

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nema 1992, 161).4 The in›uence of this approach to poverty in development discourse includes the following: by de‹ning entire nations as poor, it suggests that the nation in its entirety is the object of development initiatives, and the manner of de‹ning poverty through comparative national statistics suggests that the solution lies in emulating the industrialized nations that had “made it.”5 This rhetoric of difference contributed to the making of one statistic, GNP, into the indicator of economic progress and national well-being in the immediate postwar period and turned one aspect of development, economic growth, into a fetish. In many ways, of course, it still is—one only need to turn to the back of any World Development Report, and the most prominently displayed progress indicator is per capita income. But today, national income statistics come with caveats and warning labels and can be compared with other statistics of well-being, such as the Human Development Index of the United Nations. This was not the case in the early days of development theory. Measures for Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries proclaims that the “ultimate aim in economic development is to raise the national welfare of the entire population,” meaning raising GNP, which was considered the primary indicator of welfare (United Nations 1951, xv).6 “Essentially, the problem of economic development is that of raising the level of national income through increased per capita output so that each individual will be able to consume more,” states another in›uential development text (Ellsworth 1950, 796). The implicit assumption of such pronouncements was that a rising tide of economic growth would lift all boats. Economist Jacob Viner, writing in the late 1950s, comments on how this emphasis on national income took attention away from distributional issues: Were I to insist . . . that the reduction of mass poverty be made a crucial test of the realization of economic development, I would be separating myself from the whole body of literature in this ‹eld. In all the literature on economic development that I have seen, I have not found a single instance where statistical data in terms of aggregates and of averages have not been treated as providing adequate tests of the degree of achievement of economic development. I know, moreover, of no country which regards itself as underdeveloped which provides itself with the statistical data necessary for the discovery of whether or not growth in aggregate national wealth and in per capita

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income are associated with decrease in the absolute or even relative extent to which crushing poverty prevails. (Viner 1953, cited in Meier and Seers 1984, 338) When the distributional impact of development policies in growth models was examined, it was frequently assumed that increases in growth would trickle down to the population at large. Kuznets’s “inverted U” hypothesis, which posited an inverse relationship between income per capita and income inequality, became a central idea of early development economists and contributed to this trickle-down approach. Other development theorists, such as Lewis (1955), contended that there might be some initial increase in economic inequality especially between the traditional and modern sectors but that in the long run this inequality would be eliminated as the economy achieved a level of sustained development. In any case, even when issues of inequality within the nation were raised, the emphasis on increasing GNP as the solution to poverty was retained. Capital-centric, growth-focused models such as Harrod-Domar had an enormous in›uence on the emerging ‹eld of development economics not only in terms of their emphasis on investment and industrialization as the keys to development and the de‹nition of development as growth but also because of their contribution regarding the impetus toward national development planning. Economists such as Paul Rosenstein-Rodan (1943) laid some of the intellectual groundwork for planning by arguing that developing countries needed a “big push” through planned industrialization.7 But Harrod-Domar made planning feasible by providing what Scott (1998) terms “thin simpli‹cations,” model answers that made the solution to the problem of underdevelopment into a manageable process and one that allowed for authoritative pronouncements regarding outcomes. Armed with a con‹dence in part inspired by these models, the United Nations encouraged all developing countries to form national planning institutes in the 1950s, distributed planning manuals based on HarrodDomar to these institutes, and often staffed them with university-trained Western development economists for good measure (Staudt 1991). The World Bank also developed versions of Harrod-Domar and used these as planning tools in their investment programs. The model continues to in›uence development through its updated form, the Revised Minimum Standard Model (RMSM), which today provides the analytical foundations of contemporary World Bank structural adjustment and growth programs (Addison 1989). Along with the international ‹nancial institutions’

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enthusiasm for such approaches, there was political pressure on developing countries from the United States to pursue capital investment–centered national planning as the cornerstone of their development strategies. Aid from the United States to countries under the Alliance for Progress program in the 1960s was only available to those countries that had implemented an approved national development plan based on Harrod-Domar policy recommendations (Staudt 1991, 88). Given the beliefs and actions of development economists, international ‹nancial institutions, and Western governments, it is clear that in the early years the development imaginary was captured by the “mystique” of planning (Mehmet 1995, 91). It was believed that dramatic transformations could be wrought in the global South through the implementation of authoritative scienti‹c management and transformation of its economies, based on a presumed knowledge of the underlying facts and economic processes of these economies. Development’s attachment to planning is a re›ection of the perceived need to dramatically transform these economies because leaving things to “natural forces,” according to an early development document, would fail to yield “happy results” (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development 1950, 291). It is also, obviously, a re›ection of the highmodernist faith that economists and practitioners had in development plans to yield desired transformations. At times this faith ran so strong that economic plans, which were at ‹rst limited in scope to strictly economic processes (and largely con‹ned to the role of capital and investment), came to incorporate a broader idea of modernizing societies by transforming all aspects of social life. Gunnar Myrdal argues that development plans should “attack on a broad front” in an attempt to create “modern men” as opposed to sticking with the “narrow front of investment and production” (1968, 110). The Harrod-Domar approach was not as ambitious as Myrdal’s formulation, but limiting its scope to that “narrow front of investment and production” likely made it more powerful and persuasive than Myrdal’s approach, at least in the sense that it presented development as a manageable, technical exercise that focused on one factor, rapid capital accumulation, as the engine of development. The assumptions of the Harrod-Domar growth model, such as the neoclassical assumption of equilibrium, have been roundly criticized in the development literature as both unrealistic and Eurocentric, as has the “capital is everything” presumption of this model (see Mehmet 1995, 97–101, for a review of these criticisms). Its abstract nature has also been criticized for

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leaving out the realities of the global South in favor of mathematical elegance. While Harrod-Domar was being applied in the developing country context, economists in Britain and the United States were beginning to question the core assumptions of the model. The Cambridge capital controversy challenged growth theory’s ability to quantify and measure capital and its effects in the engineering-like manner of Harrod-Domar. Stephen Hymer (1976) also points out that the increased movement of foreign capital into the global South may have increased investment but it did not necessarily promote economic development in these countries, although it did line the pockets of many European and North American ‹rms providing investment goods and loans to the cause. Order and Stability in the Discourse of Postwar Growth and Planning Models Many of the concerns raised regarding early growth and planning models focus on their empirical assumptions. But the overarching discursive framework that contributed to these simplifying moves was that of the high modernism of development thought, which constructed the national economies of the global South as presentable, legible subjects. Economic growth was envisioned as taking place in the bounded economic space of the nation and thus was imagined as being subject to national plans. Here, the national economy was presented as if it were a free-standing entity that, with increases in investment, could turn around its past failures to develop and increase economic growth. Among its other effects, this formulation is analogous to the idea that in order to escape poverty all a person needs to do is increase his or her human capital. The problem with such conceptualizations, however, is that they imply that poverty or underdevelopment or instability is an individual problem, not one that is in›uenced by broader systemic conditions. In growth theory it is the problem of the nation-aspeople that can be solved by focusing policy on a single entity, the individual national economy. What this leaves out is a serious consideration of the economic and social systems in which the economy is embedded and how these forces might be continuing to work themselves out in global and local contexts. Another aspect of Harrod-Domar that lends legibility to the process of planning is its assumption that the country being studied is in a state of equilibrium. The concept of equilibrium contributes to a notion of national cohesiveness as opposed to con›ict. As E. R. Weintraub (1991) has argued,

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it is the economic equivalent of political stability and harmony of interests. So with Harrod-Domar, one starts out with the idea that there are optimal outcomes (given the savings constraint) based on perfect information and so forth such that everyone is maximizing his or her utility in the win-win environment of a market economy. What planning for growth does, then, is just take the economy to a higher level by increasing capital investment and/or improving the productivity of capital. The assumption of equilibrium also represents the economy as something that can be predicted and thus planned. Harrod himself, in his classic (1939) article, is skeptical about the predictability of economies, arguing that his theory suggested three possible outcomes of investment planning: the possibility of steady growth at full employment, the improbability of steady growth, and the potential instability of the rate of growth. However, by the time his ideas had been ‹ltered through the development establishment and crystallized into a growth model that could be used to plan development,8 doubts about the stability predictability and sustainability of national economic growth disappeared and were replaced by an equilibrium approach. Another related element of Harrod-Domar that contributes to the legibility of the national economy is that the model is based on the simplifying assumption of a one-good economy in addition to its assumption of competitive full-employment equilibrium ( Jones 1975, 50–62). The assumption that there is a one-‹rm economy tells a story about increasing investment in a nation as if all ‹rms and workers will be affected in the same manner. It is a story that leaves out the possibility that there are different “development logics” in different parts of the economy and/or that there will be differential effects of increased capital investment. Following Scott, we see that in seeking legibility, growth models and plans saw the economy in terms of “standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess, and manage” (Scott 1998, 81–82). One of Scott’s main points is that mapping is not just descriptive, it is a transforming act. It pushes to the margins (either by stamping out or ignoring) whatever does not ‹t into its standards of what is normal, important, and manageable. As shown in the following, this concern was raised by critics such as Hollis Chenery and others and is re›ected in their rethinking of growth models. This is not the only model to make the one-‹rm simplifying assumption. It is a standard trope of economics. Neoclassical international trade theory is also based on the conception of an industry consisting of a single ‹rm, a “national ‹rm” (Panic 1989).9 This ‹rm ‹lls the space of the domes-

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tic economy but does not spill over the borders of that economy. One consequence of this simpli‹cation is that it makes intra‹rm trade across borders (i.e., the multinational corporation) a logical impossibility. So by relying on a narrative of the national economy as a single-product and single-‹rm entity, growth theories are able to speak as if everyone in the economy will share in the fruits of increased investment, but growth theories are not able to speak meaningfully about the effects of direct foreign investment on the economy. So far, this section of the chapter has focused on the “thin simpli‹cations” that characterized one model of development, the HarrodDomar equation. However, most liberal development theories of the immediate postwar era took a similar turn with respect to (1) the nature of economic growth as a function of capital investment and (2) governmentality expressed in terms of the effective role of national state planning. And these theories, like Harrod-Domar, relied upon and af‹rmed a relatively untheorized national economic unity as the vehicle of growth and welfare for the masses. One of the implicit assumptions that constituted the economic theories of early modernization theorists was a conception of nations as autonomous units that develop primarily because of changes in internal forces. Room was made in these theories for some international exchange that would affect processes of development. However, the idea that the internal development of these nations was intimately related to their interactions with other nations or their place within a global constellation of forces (an idea later popularized by the dependency school in the 1960s and 1970s and the subject of the following chapter) was not part of the growth and modernization story. Rather, the dominant narrative of development in the 1950s and 1960s was one of autonomous and cohesive national units occupying positions along a continuum from “backward” to “modern.” Development occurred as countries moved along the trajectory from backwardness to that ultimate stage of capitalist modernity, an imagery of social change that neglected to portray that the so-called national economy of each of these units might be profoundly affected by its interactions with others or that economic policies would have different effects on different sectors and groups in the economy. While the manner in which the national economy is invoked in development thought is undertheorized, conscious elaborations of why the nation would serve as the framework for development was in part based on a narrative by which the countries of the developing world would emulate the West. In one interesting historical revision, Rostow declares that the

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national planning approach to development was simply a way for underdeveloped countries to emulate an earlier stage of the West’s economic growth. During the eighteenth century, he claims, European modernization was largely a “top-down” affair in which advancements in manufacturing and the establishment of markets were actively promoted by national governments (1975, 20). “With respect to the future,” he argues, “the economic tasks undertaken by governments in early modern Europe approximate those of the least industrialized part of the post 1945 developing world” (103). The centrality of the nation to the modernization project was also stressed by institutionalist economist Gunnar Myrdal, who was focused on the problems of newly liberated postcolonial nations. In his three-volume work Asian Drama he states that the major modernization ideals included “national consolidation,” for modernization required an “integrated national community” where “caste, color, religion, ethnic origin, culture, language and provincial loyalties would be broken down,” thus allowing for the creation of the “new man” (1968, 60–65). Through such narratives, European and North American nations are viewed as the completed products of modernity, and as a unitary, homogenous present against which the non-West plays the role of the Other. Through this construction of otherness, as Bhabha (1994) suggests, the non-West comes to represent a place that has not traversed historical time. This sort of narrative is re›ected in, for instance, Rostow’s assertions that have already been discussed, as well as his infamous (1960) presentation of “stages of economic growth” in which developing economies are engaged in a “drive to maturity” to become like the North Atlantic economies. In a similar vein, Nurkse theorizes that developing economies could develop their “infant industries” by investing in a “balanced diet” of industries (1952, 257). Again, through these tropes a national economy is characterized by its development or lack of development as if either of these had something to do with factors internal to the nation or somehow under its control.10 Early modernization and growth models envisioned the possibility for rapid development to resolve the problem of backwardness in part through framing the problem as a single-issue concern: they reduced it to a question of investment. Other determinants of development, for example, the ability of countries to be able to implement growth policies and administer development, were assumed to either be in place or be unimportant to the growth process. As O. Mehmet writes, economic-planning manuals based on these theories were drafted as if the capital/output ratio and existence of savings

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represented the “magic wand” of development planning at the macroeconomic level (1995, 96). This begs the question of how the process of waving that magic wand is conceptualized. Economic growth models generally assumed that the government could function as a neutral and effective administrator of growth policy and that the main features of economy and society were under the government planning authority’s control and responsive to the planner’s blueprints. Because growth is portrayed as happening on a national basis, and because it is assumed that the investment strategy will be implemented by or through the state, representations that present the state as a neutral tool (for instance, by simply assuming that the state will look at the model and the data to make the best judgment in terms of encouraging private, state, or foreign savings in order to secure the target growth rate) were at that time the most useful and thus most used. These representations go hand in hand with portrayals of the national economy as a suitable target for intervention. In order to conceptualize planning as a willful, scienti‹c, and predictable exercise, there must be a representation of the national economy in which it appears possible to carry out these plans. In the absence of the idea that the national economy’s boundaries de‹ne it as a functional, controllable space, it would be dif‹cult to make claims about the ability of plans to bring about predictable economic transformations. Without a functional object of development, it is not possible to speak of the solution to underdevelopment as if it were an engineering problem. As discussed in chapter 1, the idea that a social entity can function as a separate and functional object of inquiry did not begin with twentieth-century managerialism. It is the legacy of an approach to knowledge that has been around since René Descartes. In the Cartesian system, truth was de‹ned as the certainty of representing a ‹xed object that stands separate and apart from the inquirer. As many philosophers and social theorists have demonstrated, the adoption of this system introduced to Western European cultures a new, modern way of understanding the world. The modernist project orders the world into free-standing, separate objects of human knowledge, “enframing” them to stand ready before the scienti‹c analyst (Heidegger 1977). The construction of the object of knowledge in this manner also presupposes a particular kind of knowing subject, a distant and separate rational analyst who can see and understand objects in their totality. This manner of enframing the world is frequently associated with the modern posture toward nature as a “calculable coherence of forces” (Hei-

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degger 1977, 21), an object of research, and something that stands in reserve for human use. But as Heidegger points out (and Foucault elaborates), human subjects have also been enframed within modern thought, for instance, within the human sciences of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics. In these disciplines, humans and human societies are imagined, studied, and analyzed as orderly and predictable objects of knowledge (Foucault 1973). Economists, for instance, frequently present accounts of behavior that are enframed by rational choice theory in an effort to make human behavior “presentable,” a human version of Heidegger’s “calculable coherence of forces.” In doing so, they also present accounts of themselves as separate and distinct from the subjects that they are studying. This is accomplished through the use of dispassionate, mathematical language and other rhetorical devices to create that sense of separation between the producer and the object of knowledge.11 Similarly, social systems such as the national economy are conceived within this epistemology as separate, self-contained, and calculable objects (Mitchell 1998). In the narratives of national development planning we ‹nd a particular method of ordering thought that enframes the national economy. Each national economy is portrayed as a free-standing unit with an internal logic that can be grasped by the planner. All of the persons, households, resources, struggles, strategies, capacities, and in›uences contained within it are subsumed within a single, interconnected whole. This subject/object ontology, as feminist philosophers have pointed out, is not universal but instead re›ects gendered value systems. Since the seventeenth century, conceptions of knowledge have relied on a set of gendered hierarchical dualisms in which science is identi‹ed with masculinity, universality, detachment, and control, which can be contrasted with the identi‹cation of femininity with difference, connectedness, and submission (Keller 1985; Bordo 1987). “Good” scienti‹c practice is de‹ned along the masculine pole—the objective analysis of the detached observer who enjoys what Susan Bordo (1987) refers to as “a view from nowhere.” The object in this subject/object dualism, in contrast, is a feminized site of submission to scienti‹c expertise. For instance, as Francis Bacon asserts in his Masculine Birth of Time, “I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to binder her to your service and make her your slave” (Keller 1985, 39). While no longer so explicitly stated, this masculinist ontology is still part of the Cartesian legacy of objectivism in a quest for certainty and order that dominates the natural and social sciences today. This ontology is not just masculine but race and class speci‹c. As Sandra Harding has argued

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(1986, 177), it re›ects a distinctly European, bourgeois world view, one that has contributed to what Edward Said (1979) refers to as the “imaginative geography” of colonialism that constructs the nations of the global South as the objects of European control. This imaginative geography is certainly at work in representations of nations in economic growth macromodels, where we are confronted with an object in need of expert intervention that is being viewed in its totality, as if the analyst were standing outside or above it.12 The effect of this representation underscores the image of the masculine, detached, objective nature of the development planner. As Chatterjee (1993a) points out, it leaves the planner outside of the picture. Economic models such as Harrod-Domar imagine the planner as a consciousness that stands outside the national economy. The planner’s ability to do this is dependent upon a vision of the national economy as a separate, self-contained, and ordered object of disciplinary inquiry, a way of seeing that forms a major piece of what Scott refers to as “seeing like a state.” Expanding beyond the Boundaries? Difference, Complexity, and Planning The staying power of this particular way of seeing is in evidence even as development economists begin to question some of these unifying representations. Economists concerned with the unrealistic and/or limited nature of growth models often rejected the assumption(s) of the nation as a closed system and/or as an undifferentiated aggregate entity. At the same time, they retained the basic framework of legibility and continued to view the national economy as a functional unit that could be understood and manipulated in its totality. The work of Hollis Chenery, for example, consisted of disaggregating the national economy into multiple sectors (e.g., Chenery and Clark 1959; Chenery 1969) and arguing that developing economies faced not one savings gap but also perhaps the problem of a lack of foreign exchange, which would impede growth; thus a two-gap model of development was conceived (Chenery and Bruno 1962). Chenery’s moves in this direction, like his later emphasis on the differential effects of economic growth within a national economy, demonstrate a certain impetus to fragment or at least segment the national economy into multiple sectors. His contributions make the unifying, homogenizing images of the nation in the basic Harrod-Domar model more visible. For instance, Chenery and Bruno’s two-gap approach to development, which

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led to modi‹cations in planning theory in the 1960s, was critical not only of the earlier theory’s neglect of the binding foreign exchange gap but also for its inability to take into account that those who make decisions over savings, investment, exports, and imports are different people facing different structural constraints (Chenery and Bruno 1962). Chenery’s insistence on the need for sectoral planning models is based on the supposition that the agricultural, mining, industrial, service, and other sectors of an economy might each have their own logics that need to be understood separate and apart from the other (e.g., Chenery and Clark 1959). The national economy is presented as more complicated and multiple as compared with the simple one-‹rm, one-sector growth models. The complicated nature of the developing economy is suggested further by Chenery’s argument that the institutional structure of the developing economy determines the rules of the game by which economic agents within each nation interact. Markets do not always clear in the developing economy; prices are not always ›exible. So one must specify the institutional and structural constraints that will affect outcomes in the economy (see especially Chenery 1979). For instance, in some sectors, agents may face ‹xed prices, which will lead them to make decisions in a manner quite different from those who are in markets with ›exible prices. Thus it is important to understand the decentralized decisions in different sectors. The goal of Chenery’s decomposition of the national economy is not, however, to say that the national economy is excessively complicated and thus not an adequately presentable subject. Instead the goal is to provide a more accurate picture of how the economy works in different sectors, putting these together as a structural, logical whole in order to construct effective national development plans. The economic structure of the national economy becomes, as Ruccio (1991) suggests in a slightly different context, the determining essence of the economy through which we can understand and manipulate the nation. In other words, rather than seeing the national economy as a con›ictual and contradictory site, we are presented with a picture of the economy as a set of economic sectors whose behaviors apart and together are predictable and can be ‹t into a broader logic of national economic development planning. Thus, Chenery’s decomposition of the national economy results in a discursive recomposition within what are now known as economywide models, specifying different industries’ requirements for capital goods and the ›ow of production, incomes, and demand between sectors. The cohesive, manageable national economy remains the primary object of these

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development plans. Economywide models spread the different sectors in the national economy before the eyes of the economic theorist and planner, who then uses an algorithm to determine what levels of investment, savings, imports, and external borrowing are required to reach a target rate of national growth. Flows of capital and goods in and out of the nation and in and out of different sectors are ‹t within the overarching logic of the national economy and calibrated to its logic as one would calibrate such ›ows in a machine. When Chenery began his tenure at the World Bank in the 1970s, he instituted the use of one type of these economywide models, the Revised Minimum Standard Model (RMSM), and made this the standard analytical tool. In part, his goal was to make sure that World Bank policy was consistent across countries. While the RMSM takes into account that there are different types of economies made up of different con‹gurations of sectors, the core of the model remains the same independent of the context in which it is applied. Like Harrod-Domar, the RMSM targets output growth as a function of savings and the incremental capital/output ratio. And like the older Harrod-Domar one-sector growth model, underdeveloped nations are portrayed as if they lack one thing, capital. The plans that use the RMSM as their analytical foundation are aimed at ‹nding and ‹lling that lack in each country. Disaggregating the national economy to take into account the relative importance of different sectors does not, in the end, change the idea of development as growth or the “capital is everything” approach to growth theory. The process of disaggregating the economy for sectoral analysis also does not lead to a fundamental questioning of the national economy as an object of authoritative intervention. The nation is portrayed as something that can be understood as if we are looking down at it from above; as something that can be grasped by the knowing mind of the development expert, now armed with more sophisticated tools; and as an economic space that can be successfully predicted and engineered through development planning. The tendency to bring more data, complexity, different sectors, even political and social relations into the planning mechanism may be, as Chatterjee suggests, a re›ection of the very nature of planning itself. He writes that Planning, as the concrete embodiment of the rational consciousness of a state promoting economic development, can proceed only by constituting the object of planning as objects of knowledge. It must

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know the physical resources whose allocation is to be planned, it must know the economic agents who act upon those resources, it must know their needs, capacities and propensities, know what constitutes the signals according to which they act, know how they respond to those signals. . . . This knowledge would enable him to work upon the total con‹guration . . . to produce a general result in which everybody would be better off. The state as a planning authority can promote the universal goal of development by harnessing within a single, interconnected whole the discrete subjects of power in society. It does this by turning those subjects of power into the objects of a single body of knowledge. (Chatterjee 1993a, 207, emphasis in the original) If this is the case, then in some sense institutionalist approaches to development planning might represent planning at its apogee. In the name of holistic social transformation, institutionalists such as Gunnar Myrdal and Paul Streeten advocated an approach to development planning that takes into account economic, social, and political processes in an effort to transform the entire society. In this, the institutionalists challenge some of the organizing assumptions of abstract models such as Harrod-Domar, RMSM, and other macrogrowth models and thus challenge one root of scientism in planning theory. They begin with the idea that each economy is a complex and historically unique social phenomenon, lodged within a social system that is itself located within history. This perspective is critical of formalistic model building and argues for a more detailed and empirical exposition of the dynamics of individual economies and societies.13 In addition, the institutionalists raise questions about the ability of the social scientist to be objective as he or she engages in a complex and dynamic social world, and they are skeptical of the claims to objectivity made by “scienti‹c” development model builders of the Keynesian and neoclassical stripe (Myrdal 1958). Both Streeten and Myrdal (like many institutionalist economists before them) argue that values are never completely left behind in social science research (Streeten 1972; Myrdal 1958). Despite both the recognition of the complexity of each developing nation and the limits to rational, detached knowledge, institutionalist development economists embraced the most ambitious and overarching type of social planning as the key to national economic and social development. First, they took the position that understanding a country’s economy requires detailed studies of the economic, social, political, and cultural aspects of the whole. Only on the basis of this detailed knowledge could

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subsequent policy-making be attempted. Policies should be aimed at changing not only economic relations but the entire social system. This is expressed throughout Myrdal’s work but is most clearly elaborated in his Challenge of World Poverty, exempli‹ed in statements such as “what in fact we mean by development is the movement up of the whole social system” (1970, 268). This view of development is not presented as “objective” but based on a value commitment to a style of social science that is dominated by the image of rational social reform (Myrdal 1958). Myrdal speci‹es an agent that can facilitate and direct such a “movement up of the whole system.” This agent is the state acting in the interests of national development. The state planning machine is the only institution that can, under the right conditions, order and implement these programs of social change. The process of development is the struggle of state planners to enact a broad front of reforms so as to redirect the socioeconomic system onto an upward path of development: What a state needs . . . is precisely a macro-plan for inducing changes, simultaneously, in a great number of conditions, not only in the economic, and doing it in a way so as to coordinate all these changes in order to reach a maximum development effect of efforts and sacri‹ces. (Myrdal 1970, 21) This statement is obviously based on the key assumptions of governmentality as discussed in the last chapter and the concept of legibility discussed at the beginning of this one— that the state will have the requisite knowledge about the national economy and all of its core social, economic, cultural, and political factors. Whether or not the developmental state can carry out such a plan is a concern of Myrdal’s. He notes that one of the major stumbling blocks to development is that states in Third World countries might not be up to the important task of planning, due to their “general lack of social discipline” (1970, 229). He argues that development thinkers need to investigate by what means the undisciplined “soft state” of the less developed economy can be changed into more of a “strong state” that can carry out such a program because this is “the most important task to be ful‹lled in order to make possible rapid development” (241). Myrdal’s approach is exempli‹ed in his three-volume work Asian Drama (1968), which covers many different aspects of Southeast Asian development. The analysis stresses that the institutional, cultural, and social factors are as important as the economic and technological aspects of develop-

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ment. In fact, much of the focus of the text is on the need to replace traditional values with the “modernization ideals” that are speci‹c to each country (54).14 While he believed that the path to modernization would be different for each country, the end goals would be much the same: “effective nationstatehood” through national independence and consolidation (in order to plan effectively), leading to an increase in productivity (65) and changing the values of a society to create “new men, modern men” (529). While I cannot do justice to the entire institutionalist approach to planning or the complexity of Myrdal’s ideas in this brief summary, some basic concepts emerge that allow for a view of how this brand of institutionalism imagined the developing nation as an object and subject of development. By rejecting the neoclassical/Keynesian proposition that the economy can be understood as disembedded from social relations, Myrdal does get us away from the abstract, technicist approach to development taken by macromodeling approaches. In the institutionalist world, national economies are not like machines that can be ‹xed with the same model and/or compared with each other but are historically and culturally contingent spaces. In this, institutionalists like Myrdal and Streeten create an intellectual space for a richer understanding of developing economies as complexly constituted sites. The abstract economistic approach of macromodels is, however, replaced by Myrdal with a broad social-engineering view of planning in which economic, social, and cultural factors can be placed in some kind of planning matrix and transformed in relatively predictable ways by a “reasonable” consciousness that stands outside of the social space it is transforming. That reasonable consciousness would be the representative of the will of the nation’s people, the government, in the form of a “strong state.” While part of the intention of this approach is to empower the Third World nation, it should also be noted that in this view of development planning the national economy (and the people within it) is simultaneously portrayed as the passive object of this consciousness. Of course Myrdal believed that the making of “modern men” through planning would bring progress and freedom to those persons being reeducated. In this Myrdal represents the values of liberalism, and he in fact refers to himself as “a student of the Enlightenment” on this issue (1970, 435). But in Myrdal’s economic theory, there are subjects that need to be disciplined in order to achieve the goal of modernization. These include not only the individual agents that do not conform to the norms of modern North Atlantic societies but entire developing nations, whose supposed

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lack of social discipline keeps them in a subordinate position. Their only hope for progress is to develop “strong states,” which will then presumably direct these nations into modernity by transforming the entirety of social life within the country and making it modern like the advanced societies of the West. With this pronouncement, at least, the Myrdalian approach to planning is “written in that grim prose of power that each nation can wield within its own sphere of in›uence” (Bhabha 1990, xx). Despite challenges to the “thin simpli‹cations” of early growth models, representations of the national economy as a functional, self-contained entity have been retained and continue to underwrite economic development theorists’ and planners’ abilities to know and control economic space. Even as economists generated different visions of the national economy as open to trade, or as made up of different economic sectors, or as a more complex social system, they fell back upon narratives of the nation as a functional, legible object of authoritative intervention whose logic can be grasped by the development expert. Beyond Growth and Back Again In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the “growth is everything” approach to development came under scrutiny. While this opened the way for challenging economic narratives of nation-as-community and replacing them with tales of difference and con›ict, economists tended to contain these elements and pull back toward cohesive representations of the economy and away from fragmented ones. This strong preference toward cohesive representations of development’s object was apparent even in the early years, when the growth-is-everything presumption ruled almost without question and GNP was enthroned as the indicator of progress. As discussed in a previous section, some development economists recognized that industrialization might have differential effects on populations, but difference and struggle within the nation were rhetorically contained by positing that the bene‹ts of industrialization would trickle down; thus GNP growth was imagined to bene‹t everyone in the nation. Similarly, in two-sector modernization and growth models such as the Lewis approach described in the preceding, the potential tensions and struggles between the so-called traditional and modern sectors that might arise during the push to industrialize are contained and/or marginalized. The dichotomy of modern/traditional that animates these theories has by now been widely criticized for its Eurocentrism (Mehmet 1995; Escobar

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1995a). What has not been explored in any detail in these critiques is the extent to which dualistic portrayals of the developing world stabilize the thin simpli‹cations of early modernization and growth theories. The “national economy” that is the object of study in these models is contained within the framework of the modern sector, the economic equivalent of the political notion of the public sphere. For example, a World Bank study states that the agricultural sector needs to be acted upon by development initiatives, and through “monetization and marketization” it can achieve a “transition from traditional isolation to integration with the national economy” (World Bank 1975, 16). To argue that someone or something needs to be integrated into the national economy does, of course, suggest that it is not currently part of that object. And in fact, the traditional sector is often portrayed as this object’s Other—not as a part of the nation but instead as something that needs to be dramatically transformed so that it will not continue to be a barrier to the nation’s economic development. Early studies of developing economies focused on the traditional subsistence sector in order to better understand how to transform it. In a telling metaphor, Lewis refers to the traditional sector as the “economic darkness” that surrounds the developed capitalist centers of the underdeveloped nations (1958, 409). As Catherine Scott (1995) points out, this dualistic construction of societies in modernization theory is dependent upon a social construction of gender in which male/culture/modernity is understood to be superior to female/nature/tradition. Modernization requires its agents to be autonomous, self-suf‹cient, separate from the household, and rational—in a word, masculine. Rostow, for instance, contrasts family and household with the modern world of markets and technology, arguing that modernization can only take place when “men come to be valued in society not with their connection to clan or class but for their individual ability to perform certain speci‹c, increasingly specialized functions” (1960, cited in Scott 1995, 32). Here, traditional society is associated in modernization theory with the “feminine” qualities of connectedness, rigidity, multiplicity, and lack of orderliness.15 Theories of modernization also trade in gendered narratives of public/private, which treat the “private” sphere of traditional society as inferior and a persistent threat to the goals of modernization. As Scott argues, the theme of struggle and mastery over a feminized concept of tradition resonates with liberal evolutionary metaphors of change and the possibility of using social engineering to facilitate that change. Such discourses produce the idea of the national economy, as Bhabha puts it,

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through “a continuous narrative of national progress,” a conceptual mapping that puts the “progressive” modern sector at its core (1990, 1).16 What is pushed to the periphery in these dualistic approaches is the subsistence production done by poor people and by women of various classes, which, as Wood demonstrates, reinforces Eurocentrism as well as male bias in development economics (2003, 306). Denying and/or breaking through the chaos of the traditional realm to create an orderly, manageable modern world permeates modernization theory (Scott 1995, 40). The modernization theorists’ focus on the modern sector and relegation of the traditional sector to the status of development’s Other provides more than an instance of Eurocentrism. It offers a clear example of what James Scott (1998) has identi‹ed as a central project of high-modernist social engineering—an attempt to create a population with the standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor and manage. The peoples and activities associated with the traditional sector fail to ‹t into these models of market rationality and capital investment and are therefore left out of the frame, either ignored or subsumed within the greater logic of capitalist development. While Catherine Scott is correct to point out that the social constructions of masculine and feminine in modernization theories did not correspond to the lived experiences of men and women in the global South (for instance, both men and women in the feminized “traditional” sector suffered from and resisted attempts by development planners to transform their way of life), these patriarchal constructions did have a negative impact on many women’s lives. For example, based on the gendered dichotomies through which the meaning of modern/traditional are framed, the work that was done by men was considered modern and thus superior to the kinds of tasks undertaken by women (Scott 1998, 123). Lewis, for instance, assumed that most of the productive labor was done by men. When he does discuss women’s work in the so-called traditional sector, he claims that capitalist development will allow a country to produce much more ef‹ciently the sorts of productive things that women do in the household. Among these he includes the following tasks: grinding grain, making clothes, and nursing the sick. He claims that modernization will allow women to gain “freedom from drudgery,” as well as from the seclusion of the household, and will give them “at last the chance to be a full human being” (Lewis 1958, 422). While this argument obviously re›ects the incredible optimism and faith in development policy to create a whole new way of life for every citizen, an attitude that characterized the early years, it also

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re›ects certain gendered assumptions regarding backwardness, inef‹ciency, tradition, and women’s work. The way that these gendered assumptions intersect with colonial tropes is the subject of an imaginative study by Cynthia Wood (2003). Wood demonstrates that within Lewis’s construction of the “modern” economic capitalist sector and the nonmarket economic activities that takes place in the “economic darkness” of the subsistence sector, there is an attempt to distinguish economic from noneconomic activities. This re›ects a ‹rstworld bias. In his examples of women’s household work listed above, such as grinding grain or nursing the sick, he only lists tasks that in the North are performed in the market (308). Those activities that make up most of women’s unpaid labor in the North, such as cleaning, childcare, and so forth are left out of the equation, “occupying the deepest shadows beyond even the economic darkness which Lewis suggests will be eliminated with development.” Esther Boserup, in her landmark study Woman’s Role in Economic Development (1970), examines the early patterns of modernization in agriculture and ‹nds that mechanization due to capital investment resulted in a decline in women’s economic status: It is men who do the modern things. They handle industrial inputs while women perform the degrading manual jobs; men often have the task of spreading (imported) fertilizer in the ‹elds, while women spread manure; men ride the bicycle . . . while women carry the headloads, as did their grandmothers. In short, men represent modern farming in the village, women represent the old drudgery. (56, emphasis added) Irene Tinker’s (1990) research supports Boserup’s claims by showing how Western development planners brought gender stereotypes into the ‹eld with them, contributing to a widening gap between men’s and women’s economic status. The policy prescriptions suggested by Boserup, Tinker, and others, however, accept the gendered terms of modernization’s superiority over tradition by arguing that what will improve the status of women is integrating them more completely into the modern sector, and they also accept the ‹rst-world criteria of generally excluding household labor from the analysis of women’s economic contribution (Wood 2003). As Gita Sen and Lourdes Benería have argued, this liberal feminist approach assumes that “modernization is bene‹cial and inevitable” in the

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global South and that its bene‹ts simply need to be extended to women.17 This not only ignores the impact of capital expansion during the colonial period, it also fails to differentiate among women of different classes (Sen and Benería 1997). Despite these problems, early liberal feminist critiques of modernization did show that economic growth did not bene‹t everyone in society and in fact caused some women’s economic and social positions to worsen. This opened the door for more richly complex analyses of the differential effects of modernization by the next generation of scholars.18 These concerns regarding the declining economic status of women in development joined a mounting set of criticisms from other quarters regarding the inequalities associated with growth theory and planning. After twenty years of development, many rural farmers, urban immigrants, industrial workers, and displaced women found themselves worse off. Inequality and poverty remained, even increased, although development planning in many cases achieved the goal of increasing per capita GNP. The failure of per capita GNP growth to “lift all boats” as promised by the trickle-down model led many to question the growth-centered strategy of development by the late 1960s and early 1970s. Concerns about poverty and the limits of growth-oriented development strategies in terms of dealing with poverty contributed to what has come to be known as the “dethronement of GNP” at this time. The growth model was leaving behind the poor, the very constituency that development was purportedly aimed at helping. As Mahbub Ul Haq, a Pakistani economist who was head of the United Nations Development Program, puts it: “We are taught to take care of the GNP and it will take care of poverty. Let us reverse this and take care of poverty as this will take care of the GNP” (1997, 58). Of particular concern was the plight of the so-called traditional rural sector. While earlier models had placed the well-being of this sector at the margins, in the mid-1970s it became a more central focus of development discourse. Under the presidency of Robert McNamara, the World Bank changed its stance toward both growth and the agricultural sector to re›ect such concerns. For instance, a policy paper on rural development states: Past strategies in most developing countries have tended to emphasize economic growth without speci‹cally considering the manner in which the bene‹ts of growth are distributed. . . . In the long run, economic development for the growing rural population will depend on expansion of the modern sector and on nonagricultural pursuits, but too strong an emphasis on the modern sector is apt to neglect the

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growth potential of the rural areas. Failure to recognize this has been a major reason why . . . rural poverty is increasing. (World Bank 1975, 16) McNamara himself also publicly criticized the increasingly inegalitarian distribution of income in developing countries and decried the invisibility of these income disparities due to the smokescreening effect of GNP per capita statistics. He called for other development objectives besides growth, such as decreasing income inequality, improving social conditions such as infant mortality rates, and meeting the basic needs of the poor. As the World Bank shifted its objectives and focus so did many of the development theorists in its orbit. Chenery (1974), for example, was one of the most in›uential of a number of mainstream economists on that score. He turned his attention to the distributional aspects of development and argued in favor of a disaggregated model that took into account not only different productive sectors (which his earlier work had done) but also the different socioeconomic groups in an economy and their interrelationships as a “basis for an integrated analysis of growth and distribution” (248). Under the auspices of the World Bank, he also organized missions to go out and measure inequality in various countries. Chenery was certainly not alone in this endeavor. A whole generation of development economists focused their attention onto the plight of the rural poor and the need for development to meet what came to be known as the “basic needs” (BN) of the poorest sectors as a precondition to industrialization and growth. The BN approach had an important place in debates about development during the 1970s. This approach was a response to the fact that growth and modernization approaches had not yielded a reduction in poverty. Also, BN posed a real challenge to the growth-oriented approach. In contrast to the productivity and thus worker-centered growth approach, it brought attention to the concerns of populations such as children, the elderly, the disabled, and the sick. It also challenged the consumeristic notion of the good life of growth theory (LaTouche 1993) by emphasizing that basic needs include both quantitative (e.g., minimal calorie consumption) and qualitative (empowerment and participation) concerns. As one International Labor Organization (ILO) document on the subject puts it, meeting basic needs means the provision of adequate food, shelter, clothing, drinking water, sanitation, health, and educational facilities as well as providing opportunities for participation and voice: “participation interacts with the two main elements of the basic needs strategy. For example, education and

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good health will facilitate participation, and participation will in turn strengthen the claim for the material basic needs” (ILO 1977, 32). Many on the Left hailed this increased concern with poverty and the social factors of development as a victory of moral and ethical principles over the cold ef‹ciency criteria that had dominated growth and modernization approaches. However, as Douglas Porter (1995) has argued, this shift in the discourse of development also needs to be viewed as an attempt to resolve a previously neglected factor that was imposing a constraint on development. In the wake of outcry regarding the failures of development from emerging social movements in the global South as well as from liberal critics inside the development establishment, meeting the unmet needs of the poor became a requirement for the system to function. A “minimum standard of living” was a “constraint” that had to be “alleviated” in order to achieve development (ILO 1977, 31). Basic needs in this sense did not challenge planning but rather could be plugged into the planning matrix: “development planning should include, as an explicit goal, the satisfaction of an absolute level of basic needs” (31). As Porter (1995) contends, the emphasis on needs and social concerns taken by the development establishment was at ‹rst complex and sometimes bewildering. He cites a remark from a development practitioner in the mid-1970s in this regard: “I don’t know what the hell the goals are, but I’m moving ahead with projects” (76). But eventually, these seemingly unintelligible elements were contained. Order, stability, and certainty were restored by incorporating social concerns into existing technocratic planning structures, and the manner in which such social concerns were tackled “reordered” many of the worries that presented a challenge to mainstream development practices. By the mid-1970s, the less intelligible factors of BN were weeded out, and the rest became “components” and “elements” that could be manipulated in planned and controlled ways (71). Among its other effects, this project relied upon making the new “clients” of development into intelligible, somewhat orderly populations. For example, while taking into account inequalities and differentiating the needs of various groups may have led to a disaggregation of data and purpose in development plans, these disaggregated groupings remained by and large closed, and thus essentialist, con‹gurations. For instance women were assigned one category and the disabled were assigned another without much attention to any overlap among groups. The focus on social indicators and BN in the 1970s thus may have rede‹ned development, but it still framed the problem of development in

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ways that met the unstated, unexamined goals of legibility and manageability. Including social development objectives such as basic nutrition, health, education, and infant mortality was thought of in terms of providing a more accurate picture of the level of a country’s development, thus allowing for better pursuit of the goals of development (which were still largely framed in terms of liberal notions of marketization, monetization, and modernization). Still, the emphasis on social aspects of development was not entirely contained within the con‹nes of the existing discourse. On the ground, it created space for counterhegemonic initiatives that might not have been anticipated. Social movements in the global South were able to appropriate the “needs” discourse of development and rearticulated their needs in radically different terms than those set out by the development establishment. For instance, rural development projects were “translated” into land reform initiatives in some parts of Latin America by local social movements (Escobar 1995b). Within the economics discipline, BN spawned a rethinking of sorts in which a few mainstream development economists began to question whether economic growth should be a goal of development at all. Dudley Seers, for instance, stated that “the need is not, as is generally imagined, to accelerate economic growth—which could even be dangerous—but to change the nature of the development process” and suggested China and Cuba as good examples to emulate in this regard (cited in Arndt 1987, 99). While there were not many mainstream development economists who jumped on Seers’s bandwagon, to a certain extent the dethronement of GDP did serve as an impetus for new ways of thinking about development. It allowed for a focus on the differential effects of development and ensuing struggles over the distribution of income within each nation. It contained an opening toward a view of the economy as a site of struggle as opposed to the picture of social harmony suggested by earlier formulations. For example, while the ILO and World Bank did not at ‹rst pay attention to the gender aspects of inequality associated with growth-planning approaches, the focus on basic needs gave feminist development critics an opportunity to have their concerns heard and get a foot in the door of the development establishment. The Human Development Index of the United Nations and Amartya Sen’s (2001) continuing work on enhancing human capabilities through development are some of the continuing legacies of this debate about growth, inequality, basic needs, and development. But this project of rethinking development was also met by a counterreaction, a “reenthronement of GNP” that downplayed con›ict and differ-

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ence and reinscribed the vision of the economy as a cohesive collective striving for a common goal, national growth, back onto the development imaginary. In some quarters, of course, the move back to GDP was not far. The ILO, whose director had coined the term “dethronement of GNP” in 1970, organized a handful of economic missions in an attempt to understand the sources of income inequality. The ILO mission to Colombia in 1970, for example, reported on the limited success of economic growth in that country in terms of helping the poor. However, the policy recommendations that came out of the report included pursuing an extremely high GNP growth rate of 8 percent for the 1970s, a much higher rate than Colombia had experienced during the 1950s and 1960s (ILO 1970). Studies emerged that criticized the statistical evidence of Chenery and others of increased immiseration of the poor in high-growth countries. Ian Little (1982) produced empirical evidence that in every economy with a growth rate of over 3 percent per year all sectors of the population bene‹tted, although some more than others. World Bank president Robert McNamara reversed his earlier position by the late 1970s. Because development needed to concern itself with the “poorest countries,” the World Bank and other international development agencies needed to “recapture the momentum of economic growth” to bene‹t entire countries instead of putting their energies into helping subsectors of developing economies (United Nations 1976). The reasons for the reenthronement of per capita GNP statistics as the indicator of development are numerous. Seers (1983) suggests that it had to do in part with the containment of growing discontent with Western development to which the inequality concerns raised by BN and social development approaches gave voice. Another factor is that by the late 1970s a different issue took precedence in development circles, the emerging debt and balance-of-payments crisis in the Third World. This led to decreased support for a development focus on distributional issues and a return to the development-as-growth model. Policies aimed at redistributing income and improving the lot of the poor (such as transfer payments, training programs, free clinics, and so forth) tended to increase the budgets of national economies. Because many of the states in developing economies began to face budget de‹cits in the 1970s, budget-cutting measures typically included scrapping or cutting back on the redistributive initiatives. Given its narrow ‹nancial approach, the conditionality that typically accompanied an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan to a country with severe balance of payments dif‹culties required that government assistance to the

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poor be cut in order to bring down the national de‹cit so that a more overarching emphasis may be placed on ef‹ciency and growth, which pushed distributive questions to the side. The argument was that these economies had “to return to fundamentals,” which meant increasing the size of the pie through growth before asking questions about distribution (see IMF 1992 for a summary of this position). When the World Bank got into the structural adjustment business in the early 1980s, it adopted the same ef‹ciency and growth-oriented adjustment strategy as its focus. For instance, in a statement about its approach to structural adjustment, the World Bank’s website states: World Bank programs are designed to help the poor. . . . What bene‹ts the poor most is rapid and broad-based growth. This comes from having sound macroeconomic policies and a strategy that favors investment. (Cited in Benjamin 2003, 203) By making growth the centerpiece of its so-called antipoverty strategy, the rhetoric of structural adjustment invokes the idea that there is a harmony of interests within each national economy. Structural adjustment theories and practices are reasserting the old trickle-down assumption that per capita GDP growth will bene‹t everyone in an economy, especially the poor. While no longer couched in the terms of government planning, the reenthronement of GDP in the context of structural adjustment allows development economists “to see like a state” by contributing to a discourse of development that treats the nation as a cohesive community in a way that makes it more manageable. The reliance on a discourse of shared national growth offers representations of the national economy as a site of common purpose and a community of people striving toward a common goal. This rhetorical move, as McNamara himself suggested when he referred to the “smokescreening” effects of GNP in the early 1970s, pushes concepts of difference and struggle within the national economy to the sideline of the development conversation. It also helps to contain economic outcomes within the space of the national economy and makes it more dif‹cult to speak about effects or commonalities across national boundaries.19 Conclusion Development theories of growth and modernization rely on representations of the national economy as a legible, cohesive object of managerial

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control. The social power of these representations, ‹ltered through the use of national income statistics and models based on aggregate measures, has been enormous. They have bolstered the idea that development theorists and policymakers are neutral experts through the presentation of the national economy as a separate, knowable, and manageable object. In addition, portraying the economy as a cohesive collective with shared goals underwrites the projection of a vision of the economy as a rei‹ed community in ways that elide key questions of difference and con›ict. The discourse of liberal growth and modernization theory, inasmuch as it relies on these naive concepts of a rei‹ed national economy, will avoid a whole range of questions. By posing all problems and issues that might come up as problems of national development, it avoids issues and programs that emphasize both con›icts within the nation and forces that transcend it. When these narratives of harmony and/or cohesiveness have been challenged within economics, the end result has been a general containment of con›ict, difference, and disorder. The examples of the construction of multisectoral models and the dethronement and reenthronement of GNP offered here show some of the ways that potentially disruptive ideas that ‹nd their way into the economic mainstream are rescripted to ‹t the logic of order, stability, and certainty that characterizes economic development theory. One might argue that this chapter focuses on a period in which development economics was focused on the role of the state and the mystique of planning and that later work has moved away from this unfortunate commitment to the now-discredited regime of planning and therefore away from an emphasis on the legibility and manageability of the economy. By the mid-1980s, economists took the lead in moving the development establishment away from planning. Under the broad rubric of structural adjustment, which rested on an edi‹ce of neoclassical economic theory, development discourse came to de‹ne the state as the latest in a long line of constraints on growth. Achieving economic growth was no longer the project of the planning institute but was rather posited as the natural outcome of market liberalization. But, as I discuss in chapter 4, this return to the market did not interfere with development economists’ capacities “to see like a state” in the least. The national economy and the role of the nationstate may have been reimagined as different functions became privatized. For instance Porter (1995) suggests that “participation” replaced in some sense the state in a reconstruction of imagined national community and “new” harmony of interests within it. But development economics, even in

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its most free-market variants, continued to frame its pronouncements within the context of the nation as its object: locating the problems of the developing economy within its national boundaries, imagining national economies as sites of (potential) economic harmony via equilibrium models and aggregate statistics, imagining that a nation that is successful in implementing “good” policy will absorb and/or dissolve all difference in the name of development and modernization. This allowed development experts to perform the most important trick of all—to imagine themselves as a detached rationality, separate and apart from the object they are describing.

THREE

Coloniality, Modernity, and the Nation-State in Dependency Theory

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Latin American dependency school produced an in›uential challenge to modernization and growth theory. Associated with a loosely de‹ned group of writers such as Andre Gunder Frank (1967; 1969), Theotonio Dos Santos (1970), Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1979), and Celso Furtado (1970), dependency analysis offered a criticism of the Eurocentric assumptions of modernization and growth theories, especially the historicism in which the global South was viewed as lagging behind due to lingering “traditions” and insuf‹cient contact with Western capital. Dependency theory offered an alternative view of the problem as not a lack of contact with capital but rather a direct result of capitalist processes taking place in a world system beyond the nationstate. This called into question the Enlightenment narrative of history in which capitalism is equated with progress, with all nations moving through a set of stages culminating in European development. Capitalism, according to the dependency school, was better understood as a system that had actively underdeveloped the global South through trading relations during the colonial period and later through direct investment. The dependency school’s critical assessment of the historicism of development theories, and, along with it, the dominant tropes of the developing country as a self-contained, autonomous, and homogenous unit, transformed the imaginary of development in many quarters. However, dependency theory did not break completely from the Eurocentric discourse it was trying to overcome. While challenging economic colonialism, the general lack of attention paid by most dependency analysts to the politics of 68

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representation resulted in an adherence to certain forms of what Fals Borda (1970) has termed “intellectual colonialism.” This led them to pose solutions that were reinscribed within the same geopolitics of knowledge that they were attempting to challenge. Further, it resulted in the adherence of most dependency thinkers to certain tenets of developmentalism,1 including a reliance on representations of the national economy as an object of development as discussed in the previous chapter. This focus on the functional unity of the national economy caused dependency theorists to reproduce the idea that development takes place through rational organization and planning at the level of the nation-state, an emphasis that contributed to their marginalization of those subaltern Others who did not ‹t the rubric of developmentalism, as well as to their overlooking the role of interventions from below (local) and above (global). Dependency’s Challenge to Eurocentrism The modernization and growth theorists discussed in chapter 2 took for granted that the process of development was teleological. They positioned the nations of the world on a continuum from traditional to modern, underdeveloped to developed, and emphasized the importance of national development to help the poor countries catch up. Hirschman points out that this classi‹cation schema introduced the concept of difference, without which development theory would have been an impossibility, to mainstream economic discourse.2 However, such a schema produces difference only within the con‹nes of a universalizing narrative. Lewis (1955), for example, recognized difference by dividing developing nations into modern and traditional sectors but saw as the eventual goal the transformation of the traditional sector into a modern, industrial one. Rostow’s (1960) argument that all nations pass through ‹ve stages of development—the stationary stage (traditional society), preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, and the ‹nal stage of mass consumption—created a framework for imagining nations at different stages, but it also provides a powerfully universalizing lens on the world by suggesting that all nations of the world will eventually pass through the same stages associated with the development of Western Europe and North America. Similarly, orthodox Marxist theories of development were based on the assumption that all nations passed through pregiven stages of development—primitive communal, feudal, capitalist, and socialist—and saw the problem of underdevelopment in terms of moving countries from a “lower” stage (e.g., feudal-

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ism) to the next stage (capitalism) on a teleological trajectory to the highest stage of development, that of socialism. The stage-theoretic approach that characterized development’s taxonomies on both the Right and the Left contributed to what anthropologist Johannes Fabian refers to as “temporal distancing” between countries—a “denial of coevalness” between Europe and the global South that assumed the superiority of the former by counterposing the advanced societies to the supposedly backward traditional societies that lagged behind them (Fabian 1983). A crucial piece of this story, as identi‹ed by Edward Said (1979), was the de‹ning of non-Western cultures as unchanging Others against which Europe could de‹ne itself as the site of change and innovation, what Anne McClintock refers to as “the production of anachronistic space”: Colonized people—like women and the working class in the metropolis—do not inhabit history proper but exist in a permanently anterior time within the geographical space of the modern empire as anachronistic humans, atavistic, irrational, bereft of human agency— the living embodiment of the archaic ‘primitive.’ (1997, 30) Modernization theory in both its liberal and Marxist guises, then, is part of a broader temporal perspective of history that falsely relocates the peoples of the global South and their histories and cultures in the past (Mignolo 1995). By creating a narrative in which the global South did not share the same historical time as Europe and North America, stage theory also implicitly suggested that what happened in one region had little to do with the fate of the other. This pushed to the margins of analysis the idea that an international power relationship might be an unsurmountable factor in the continuing underdevelopment of the global South. Instead, the problems and solutions were posed in terms of creating the conditions by which countries could imitate the advanced nations of the West through capital investment and new technologies. Dependency theory challenged modernization theory’s view of development as a transition from traditional to modern economic systems, its historicist stage-theoretic perspective, and its universalizing vision. It rejected the dualist narrative because the “traditional” society as identi‹ed by modernization theorists was not a pristine and untouched system. It had already been shaped by international capital. Basing their arguments on a histori-

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cal analysis that focused on speci‹c cases rather than universal laws, dependency theorists contended that the underdevelopment of the global South was caused by European development, beginning with the historical legacy of colonial control that had exploited the peoples and resources of the global South and continuing into the twentieth century through direct foreign investment and other exploitative forms of integration into the international system. From this colonial history emerged a capitalist world system of North Atlantic center and Third World periphery. The center and periphery became increasingly polarized as capitalism developed one and created underdevelopment in the other. The economies of the peripheral countries remained dependent—geared to the demands of the center economies, which exercised power over them via multinational capital, foreign investment, control over technology, and the like. Continued dependence created further underdevelopment. The critique of modernization and growth theory offered by dependency analysts such as Frank (1967) was squarely aimed at the two-sector growth models discussed in chapter 2. Frank argues that the dual-economy arguments of theorists like Lewis (1958), which attributed underdevelopment and backwardness to the traditional sector’s lack of exposure to the capitalist world, were based on historical error because “underdevelopment is not due to the survival of archaic institutions” (Frank 1969, 9). It is not the case that some nations are behind in a linear trajectory of history. Rather the unfolding of a single historical process created underdevelopment in the global South: Economic development and underdevelopment are not just relative and quantitative, in that one represented more economic development than the other; economic development and underdevelopment are relational and qualitative, in that each is structurally different from, yet caused by its relation with, the other. Yet development and underdevelopment are the same in that they are the product of a single, but dialectically contradictory, economic structure and process of capitalism. (9) Here, Frank is calling into question not only the historicism of modernization theory but also the essentialism that underlies its stage-theoretic approach—particularly modernization theory’s reliance on the idea that development and underdevelopment are based on the underlying attributes of the North Atlantic on the one hand and the global South on the other.

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For Frank and other dependency theorists, it is not the inherent qualities of the underdeveloped countries that mark them as such. Instead, the category of underdevelopment is relational, socially constructed through power relations between the core and periphery. The essentialism of modernization theory, which ascribed pregiven characteristics to the “underdeveloped” nations, was anchored by gender essentialism as well. As Catherine Scott (1995) demonstrates, modernization theory in both its liberal and Marxist guises is based on hierarchical binaries that associate the feminine with tradition, rootedness, nature, and particularism, while associating the positive modernization traits of cosmopolitanism, technology, detachment, and universality with men and masculinity. This hierarchical construction of gendered meaning has a long history in the Western tradition. For example, the ancient Greek characterization of the emergence of reason from darkness used associations of the feminine as what needed to be struggled against in order to attain reason (Lloyd 1984). Dependency theorists were aware of the use of these dualistic conceptual frameworks in modernization theory, although they did not explicitly make the gender connection. Frank, for instance, was critical of modernization theory’s dualistic association of “particularism, ascription, the diffuseness in underdevelopment with the family, the primitive tribe, the folk community, the traditional sector of dual society, and with the underdeveloped countries” (1969, 33). The conceptual challenge to historicism and essentialism on the part of dependency analysts was in part due to the in›uence of an earlier generation of Latin American and Caribbean historians such as Eric Williams, Roberto Simonsen, and Sergio Bagú, who emphasized the modern nature of noncapitalist plantation and hacienda economies (e.g., Frank 1969). In the colonial era, these production units were organized to generate a pro‹t for (and underwrite the development of) European capitalism.3 They were not precapitalist remnants of indigenous economies. The world capitalist system, in articulation with local political and economic structures, had already dramatically transformed any preexisting social formations in the New World. In this light, the so-called traditional sector identi‹ed by modernization theorists as a precapitalist social formation is better understood as the product of capitalist penetration itself. This alternative historical analysis provides a challenge not only to the stage-theoretic approach but also to the presumption that modernity is something that is strictly a European phenomenon to be copied by the countries of the South. For instance Williams (1944) demonstrates that the

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organization of sugar production on slave plantations in the Caribbean, coupled with the importance of sugar in the colonial structure of triangular trade, made the Caribbean world modern before Europe. As Sidney Mintz (1996), following Williams, argues, sugar plantations were decidedly modern institutions. These were “factories in the ‹elds” that later became a model for the industrial factories of England, and their in›uence on the development of European capitalism extended to the production and exchange of sugar in the North Atlantic. This historical scholarship challenged the view of history that places Europe as the center of modernity from which the global South functions as backward outposts and provided one of the bases from which dependency theorists developed an alternative story of a global economy in which noncapitalist processes were unfolding concurrently with capitalist development. Such challenges to modernization theory’s historicism and essentialism certainly call into question the idea that each nation pursued its individual growth path as a relatively autonomous entity. The stage-theoretic approach imagined that nations were relatively self-contained entities. Often made sense of through a metaphor of human development, some nations were seen to have advanced while others remained in a state of enduring immaturity. But these characterizations were troubling to dependency theorists because they tended to obscure relations of domination and subordination. In the of‹cial story of development, markets, capitalism, democracy, nationalism, and freedom all originated in Europe. In contrast, dependency analysts argued that any change and innovation that occurred in Western Europe could only be understood in the context of that region’s relationship with the rest of the world. Instead of seeing the world in the modernization terms of “dual systems,” dependency theory contributed to the possibility of imagining a world characterized by what Bhabha has termed “hybridity,” which results from the making and remaking of societies in the colonial context (1994, 112). The notion of hybridity challenges the universalizing story of modernization theory by dislocating Europe as the center of all change and progress. Instead, it views colonization as a process of mutual transformation. It disputes essentialism and dualistic portrayals by calling into question the idea of self-contained national traditional cultures and economies that can be presented as separate or even relatively autonomous units (4–5). Bhabha and others have focused on the nature of hybridity in terms of culture. It becomes dif‹cult to talk about pristine or authentic cultures once the notion has been introduced of the sustained cross-cultural ›ows that

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characterized the colonial experience. Similarly the dependency school’s introduction of ideas about the internationalization of the national economy and corresponding narrative of economic hybridity introduces a counternarrative in which the idea of self-contained national economies becomes more dif‹cult to imagine in the context of imperialist and neoimperialist global processes. Thus dependency thought opened the door for an alternative to the dominant discourse of modernization. Midcentury development thought was characterized by a “search for national development” in part based within the developmentalist, managerial imagination described in chapter 1 coupled with the twentieth-century ideal of national self-determination. And dependency theory, on one level, challenged such national modernization ideals by bringing international power relations and exploitation to the forefront of attention. But while a dependency analysis created the conditions for an alternative to modernization theory’s universalizing narratives, temporal perspective on economic history, and conception of economic space, its adherence to certain tenets of developmentalism did not allow it to realize this critical potential. On the one hand, dependency theorists insisted that a variety of local, national, and global economic forces had shaped societies, thus challenging the universalizing framework of modernization theory and its reduction of the global South to the homogenous Other of the North Atlantic economies. There was even some movement toward an exploration of the multiplicity of potential outcomes given different points of contact and modes of economic translation. This tendency is particularly strong in the work of Cardoso and Faletto (1979), as is demonstrated in the section that follows. But the discussion of multiple forms, while challenging developmentalist logic on the one hand, often reasserted a historicist narrative by implying that there was a uni‹ed force at work—a single capitalist modernity centered in the West—which was simply modi‹ed by local circumstances into a variety of different forms. Thus difference is often imagined and discussed in terms of this overarching logic and not in the more “troubling” terms of hybridity as de‹ned by Bhabha and other postcolonial scholars, which after all could take into account agency and resistance by challenging representations of colonial power as a uni‹ed force. Similarly, while offering an alternative to the nation-centric discourse of modernization theory by focusing on international economic processes and power relations as important forces that shape so-called national development, the dependency school tended to reassert the centrality of the nation-state in its policy prescriptions. For example, Dos Santos, in a snide

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dismissal of modernization theory, refers to the “so-called ‘national economies’” that animate its work (1970, 231). But Dos Santos does not intend to claim that the national economy is an invalid category. Instead, his point is to argue that in the context of insertion into an international system of power relations, there are not countries in the global South that could be characterized as “real” nations—self-directed, autonomous units. In his article, he goes on to suggest the conditions under which nations can become real by delinking from the global economy and developing their productive forces to the point where they have achieved true economic sovereignty. So while challenging the idea of the national economy as a centered and relatively autonomous object of development on the one hand, dependency theory simultaneously reasserted this trope of development on the other. While dependency theory was criticized during its heyday by some Latin American social theorists for denying the possibility of autonomous national development, today it has largely been de‹ned away as an outmoded, nationalistic framework because of its policy emphasis on protectionism and economic independence from the world economic system. In a sense, neither of these perspectives is correct. As Giménez (1993, 27) and Akhil Gupta (1992, 63) suggest, dependency theory’s arguments in favor of national economic autonomy somewhat paradoxically obtain their currency by being posed against international forces that threaten the agency of the nation. To put it another way, dependency theorists reproduced the idea of national development even as this contradicted their position that development and underdevelopment were the result of structural power relations in a system that lies beyond the nation-state. In the next section I engage in a closer reading of some writings within the dependency school in order to show how this paradox plays itself out. The focus is on the writings of Andre Gunder Frank and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, which indicate the variety and divergence of perspective within the dependency framework. Both of these authors challenged the historicism, universalism, and essentialism of developmentalist narratives of modernization theory, but their approaches remained con‹ned within the categories of developmentalism they were attempting to challenge. Developmentalism and Dependency Theory The writers associated with the Latin American dependency school by and large agreed on the critique of modernization theory described in the preceding. They challenged the idea that all countries move through the same

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stages as the European countries, as well as the historicism that underlies such stage-theoretic approaches. Instead of seeing underdevelopment as a problem caused by lingering traditional and/or precapitalist structures, they viewed it in terms of relations of domination and subordination in an international capitalist system. An understanding of Latin American development could not be based on the assumption that it simply needed to emulate Europe. Rather it needed to be grounded in the speci‹c structural and historical context of the region. While there are many areas of agreement among dependency theorists, there are also areas of debate. Cardoso refers to these debates speci‹cally when he argues that his position on dependent development needs to be distinguished from that of “radical” dependency theorists such as Frank (Cardoso 1977). His major point of contention is that Frank effectively denies the possibility of development for those peripheral countries that remain integrated within the capitalist world economy. Cardoso, while he acknowledges that capitalism can reinforce underdevelopment, asserts that there is a dynamism to capitalist production that does transform the forces and relations of production in the global South. Some of the differences between the perspectives of Frank and Cardoso have to do with the theoretical in›uences on their work. Frank ‹rst developed his critique of modernization theory’s dual-society thesis while working at the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) under the direction of Raúl Prebisch. Frank, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago, was part of a group of important left-wing intellectuals who had come to ECLA between 1964 and 1974, many due to their exile from countries in the region that had recently experienced military coups (Dos Santos 1998, 53). Before moving on to an investigation of Frank’s main ideas, it is useful to situate his work in the context of ECLA and Prebisch because these sources exerted a great deal of in›uence on the imagination of most writers in the dependency school, including Frank. Dependency theory grew out of a criticism of ECLA and the ideas of its director, Prebisch. But it also built upon certain of Prebisch’s insights, such as his challenge of neoclassical theories of international trade, his focus on distributional considerations, and, especially, the image of center and periphery that Prebisch used to describe the structure of the global economy. The work coming out of ECLA represented an anti-imperialist, national development ideology that had characterized strands of Latin American thought going back as far as the nineteenth century. This became more widely articulated after the experience with the Great

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Depression in the 1930s and in the face of a rapidly changing new world order that emerged after World War II to create new opportunities and constraints in the region. Many economists and policymakers refused to accept Latin America’s old position in the world economy as a primary product exporter (Sikkink 1991). They argued that the recent industrialization of some of the countries of Latin America was the basis of their economic, social, and political modernization and that agricultural and raw materials production would not serve the same function. Prebisch (1960), using data from the United Nations, supported this argument by demonstrating that the exchange between primary products and manufactured goods led to declining terms of trade for the region, as prices of raw materials and agricultural production tended to fall while those of manufactured products tended to stay constant or rise. This challenged the neoclassical theory of comparative advantage and trade, which had been used to argue that the countries of Latin America would be better off concentrating on primary product production and export. The alternative advocated by Prebisch and ECLA was to nurture the emergence of a domestic capitalist class that produced manufactured goods for the internal market, thus decreasing dependence on foreign-made goods. This would allow for the development of an industrial base that could serve as the basis of modernization and the demise of archaic economic and political forms. As discussed in chapter 1, Prebisch’s views had self-consciously economic nationalist implications. While acknowledging the in›uence of nineteenth-century economic nationalist Friedrich List, Prebisch’s thinking was also the product of Latin American debates around economic nationalism that had taken place for nearly a hundred years. For example, in the late nineteenth century many Argentine politicians questioned the central tenets of free trade, arguing that instead the nation should protect its infant industries (Grosfoguel 2000). Other countries, such as Peru, had similar debates around the issue of free trade during this period (Frank 1969). The notion of economic nationalism that, like List, many in the region espoused during this earlier period was one of protection just until the nation achieved national capitalist development generated by a local bourgeoisie. At the point when the nation had become an autonomous equal on the world economic stage, free markets were to be encouraged. Similarly, Prebisch argued that import-substitution industrialization (ISI) would constitute a phase of Latin American economic development that would allow the countries of the region to catch up with the West. Once that goal was achieved and nations had achieved economic

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autonomy and sovereignty, the region would abandon protectionism in favor of free trade. Dependency theorists such as Frank thought that ECLA put too much faith in capitalist industrialization as a guarantor of modernization, democracy, and autonomy. Despite its challenge to a number of tenets of orthodox development and growth theory, and its self-conscious attempt to create a local alternative to North American and European economic theorizing, it framed the problem as precapitalist backwardness and offered capitalist development as the key to the region’s economic well-being. In this sense the ECLA approach did not stray very far from the development thinking of North American modernization theory. It also failed to deliver the goods. The ISI policies suggested by ECLA did not yield the hoped-for results of economic stability, lessening income inequality, and democracy in the region. As Albert Fishlow (1987) points out, ISI not only failed to create the conditions for national economic autonomy, it actually increased reliance on foreign capital because ISI was fueled largely by foreign investment. Also, ISI did not improve distribution (a more equal distribution of income being seen as a basic building block for democracy in the region) because it took place in the context of monopolistic and oligopolistic markets and did not create suf‹cient employment to drive wages up in the labor market because of its capital-intensive nature. The continued existence of cheap labor attracted even more foreign investment, and domestic capitalists’ interests became aligned more closely with multinational capital than with that of the rest of the population in the home country. Dependency theorists focused their criticism of ECLA not only on its retention of a historically ›awed stage-theoretic analysis but also on the particularities of its national development strategy. While the ECLA approach placed emphasis on the role of the domestic capitalist class in spearheading national development, most writers in the dependency school had little faith in the national bourgeoisie. In the constellation of economic and political forces that made up the global capitalist system, this group would be more likely to collaborate with imperialism than push for any sort of “authentic” progressive development for its home nation. As Frank writes, “The national bourgeoisie, where it can be said to exist, and indeed the entire national metropolis and capitalist system on which it thrives, are so inextricably linked into the imperialist system and the exploitative metropolis-periphery relationship it imposes on them that it cannot possibly escape from and can only extend and deepen the resulting underdevel-

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opment” (1969, 228–29). The construction of nations as self-contained economic entities that could somehow be “developed” as portrayed in ECLA analysis was troubling to dependency theorists. This portrayal tended to obscure global relations of domination and subordination. It failed to show that the causes of underdevelopment were not due to some internal, domestic failings but rather to the operation of capitalism on a global scale. In his break from the modernization approach of ECLA, Frank was in›uenced by the neo-Marxist analysis of development presented in Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth.4 According to Baran, European colonization had left Africa, Latin America, and most of Asia in an economically disadvantageous position of stagnation rather than growth. This process of stagnation was furthered in the postcolonial era by the national capitalist class, which in collusion with monopoly capital in the industrial countries engaged in accumulation strategies that further impoverished their countries. Baran argues that the only way for the nations of the global South to break free of this stranglehold was to break with the international capitalist system and pursue autonomous development. Frank applied Baran’s thesis to the study of Latin American development. Based on research that focused on the cases of Chile and Brazil, he challenges the dual-society approaches of North American modernization theories, orthodox Marxism, and ECLA, which all saw the problems of these economies as insuf‹cient contact with capitalism and imagined the solutions to lie within increasing exposure of these countries to the capital, institutional structures, and values of the modern world (Frank 1967). As discussed in the preceding, Frank offers an alternative narrative in which underdevelopment was not due to lingering traditional economies or the existence of a capital shortage but in which European development and Latin American underdevelopment were viewed as “opposite faces of the same coin.” Europe’s modernization is made possible by the exploitation of the global South (Frank 1967, 9). According to Frank, when Latin America was colonized, Europe appropriated surplus from the region in order to fuel its own growth. During this process, it brought all of the region into its orbit—“a whole chain of constellations of metropoles and satellites relates all parts of the whole system from its metropolitan center in Europe or the United States to the farthest outpost in the Latin American countryside” (Frank 1969, 6). After political independence, according to Frank, the capitalist system retained control over the region due to the role played by the nationalist capitalist class. While liberal modernization theorists, Latin American communist parties,

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and ECLA economists all saw the local capitalist class as the major force for progress in the region, Frank takes a much dimmer view of its potential role in this regard: there can be no hope of a bourgeoisie leading the economy and people out of underdevelopment. . . . The progressive potential and capacity of the bourgeoisie and its state are strictly limited, not by any “non-capitalist” or “pre-capitalist” institutions or structure in their provincial hinterland, but by the very capitalist structure imposed on it by its own world capitalist metropolis and by its own . . . vested interest in maintaining this capitalist structure on the . . . local level. (1967, 118–19) Therefore the only path to development is delinking from the world system and developing a socialist state to replace the national capitalist class, whose “vested interests” will ensure that it will not pursue policies that will end dependency and underdevelopment (Frank 1969, 371). Cardoso’s work can be contrasted with Frank’s in that he sees a possibility for development, albeit dependent development, within the world system. His work traces out the factors that support or impede development in the dependent economies in Latin America. Cardoso, a Brazilian sociologist, also spent time in ECLA. He was an early and in›uential contributor to dependency thought who in later years turned away from many of his earlier theoretical pronouncements regarding underdevelopment and led a center/conservative government in Brazil in the late 1990s. Like Frank, Cardoso adopts a historical and structural approach to understanding dependency and views capitalism as a global system. But Cardoso’s analysis attempts to break with the economic determinism that he identi‹es as plaguing Frank’s and other dependency approaches. He is much more interested in how local social practices resist and/or reproduce neoimperialism, and in his work (both individually and in the classic book he wrote with Enzo Faletto) he examines the role of alliances among foreign interests and local classes, as well as the role of alliances among local groupings and ideologies such as labor, the peasantry, ethnic groups, nationalism, the national bourgeoisie, and so forth. Because of this, his theory contends that despite structural power relations “there is room for alternatives” (Cardoso and Faletto 1979, xi). In Cardoso and Faletto’s Dependency and Development in Latin America, the condition of the periphery is not portrayed as completely determined by

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the logic of capital accumulation as directed by the core countries. While Frank takes the position that international capital has basically called the shots, Cardoso and Faletto contend that outcomes in Latin America are better understood by looking at “forms of local societies, reactions against imperialism, the political dynamics of local societies, and attempts at alternatives” (Cardoso and Faletto 1979, xv–xvi). Of course, nearly all dependency theorists agree with their assertion that in order to understand underdevelopment, it is necessary to understand the ways in which foreign interests come to be internalized in a country over time. A system of power associated with foreign capital, foreign polities, and so forth is most effective when it “reappears as an ‘internal’ force, through the social practices of local groups and classes” (xvi). Thus dependence is a situation in which internal forces are oriented in favor of foreign interests (Cardoso 1985, 50). But the break with Frank, Dos Santos, and others is Cardoso and Faletto’s contention that a country’s particular social and economic structure is not simply the product of the global logic of capital but rather the interactions between the “logic of capital accumulation” and “national character traits” (Cardoso and Faletto 1979, xv). Given the multiplicity of possible interactions here, they catalogue a plurality of “situations of dependency” that a nation-state could ‹nd itself inhabiting (xxiii). There can be outcomes in which a nation is nearly completely dominated by foreign capital, or there can be situations of national underdevelopment in which attempts are made at achieving a sort of political delinking from the center nations (21–22). Similarly, Cardoso discusses the difference between autonomous developed nations such as the United States, dependent developed nations, such as Brazil, autonomous underdeveloped nations, such as Cuba, and dependent underdeveloped nations (the classic dependent peripheral economy described by Frank and others) (Cardoso 1972). What this typology re›ects is the separation of the economic state of development/underdevelopment from the political state of autonomy/ dependency. For example, a nation can have a developed economic system in the sense of being industrialized while still being dependent in a broad sociopolitical sense (e.g., Brazil). Conversely, countries can gain some autonomy of decision making in the world system while remaining underdeveloped (e.g., Cuba). By delinking autonomy from development, Cardoso and Faletto are making a number of breaks with Frank, Dos Santos, and other dependency theorists, even while not straying far from the general assumptions of the dependency school. This analytical lens, and attention to the role of local forces, allowed

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them to examine further differences among Latin American countries. Nationally controlled export economies are contrasted to enclave economies in which production and export are controlled by foreign capital. “New dependency” is a more recent form of dependency that relates to the movement of multinational capital to the periphery in order to secure markets for export goods. These different forms of dependency are based on articulation at the level of the national social formation, not the country’s location in a determining global economy (Cardoso and Faletto 1979, 130). Unlike Frank, who sees the singular logic of global capitalism’s hand at work in the most remote corners of the world, Cardoso and Faletto see multiple capitalist systems at work. Nearly each nation represents its own speci‹c social formation, its own particular form of capitalism. Cardoso (1973) suggests that there are three ways that nations of the global South can achieve development. The ‹rst occurs when an economically dependent nation achieves political autonomy, which will allow it to transform itself toward industrialization and thus economic independence. The second possibility occurs when an export-oriented economy accumulates enough capital that it can industrialize. Despite this nation’s remaining in a state of “new dependency” due to its reliance on export demand, its ability to industrialize is placing it on the path toward economic autonomy. In the third way even peripheral, dependent economies such as Peru can develop, albeit without losing their dependent status, by encouraging multinational capital investments, particularly those that involve technology transfer. These will allow the dependent nation to industrialize. But given this typology, the conclusion Cardoso and Faletto come to is similar in some respects to a more general belief of modernization theorists: since the problem is national in character, the solution is national. It is ultimately the internal processes of the nation-state, and not the global economy, that determine if a country is dependent or not, developed or not. Cardoso and Faletto’s framework assumes that because dependency is the orientation of internal forces toward foreign interests, then dependency can be broken by changing to a more internal orientation. One might even call it nationalistic because what they recommend is pursuing policies (whether socialist planning, export promotion, or government inducements to foreign capital) that share one common feature—they are aimed at bene‹tting the nation by guiding it toward eventual economic sovereignty. And because underdevelopment is characterized by Cardoso and Faletto as a stage at which the productive forces have not been grown, that internal orientation should emphasize the development and use of

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advanced technology. It is the existence of noncapitalist forms of economic activity, coupled with the political failures of national governments, that keeps countries in the region from achieving economic and social maturity.5 This explanation is focused on the economic and political dynamics within the nation, not the global capitalist system. Therefore, while raising important issues about colonialism and power in development, Cardoso and Faletto’s solution for eliminating dependency, like Frank’s, remained grounded in a particular sort of economism—one that considered the economy to be a self-regulated and self-reproducing space, a social formation governed by inherent laws of capitalist development and other driving forces (Ruccio, Resnick, and Wolff 1990). For Frank this was the global capitalist system, governed by the needs of the core economies. Somewhat paradoxically, he offered a national solution to this global problem by positing that autonomous development could take place by breaking free of this determining system.6 For Cardoso and Faletto there was less paradox—the system articulated itself at the level of the nation-state, and therefore internal forces could break it out of dependency and/or underdevelopment. By emphasizing the openness of dependent nations, dependency thinkers did challenge the nation-as-individual rhetoric of modernization theories of both neoclassical and Marxian varieties. However, as David Ruccio, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff suggest, the untheorized unity of the national economy as development’s object is still preserved in dependency thought (1990, 24). It aligned a modernist preference for “legibility” (discussed in the previous chapter) with Enlightenment notions that favored sovereignty and autonomy. It assumed that progress could only be achieved through the rational organization of the economy in which “each nation-state could achieve an autonomous national development through the conscious, sovereign, and free control of their destiny” (Grosfoguel 2000, 361). In this sense dependency theory remained within the dominant discourse of national development explored in the two previous chapters. It explained underdevelopment in terms of a logic that presumes the existence of a national economy, which explains why dependency theorists’ policy conclusions so often turned on delinking from the global economy in order to achieve authentic, independent development. Dependency theory’s attachment to the Enlightenment ideas of national unity, autonomy, rational control, and so forth is better understood within a broader context of the developmentalist and Eurocentric tendencies of dependency theory. Before beginning a discussion of the

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implications of dependency theory’s narratives of the nation, we turn ‹rst to these issues. While attempting to shift away from the idea that Europe serves as a universal model for the rest of the world, dependency theorists nonetheless retain the essentialist dualism of developed/undeveloped, center/periphery, and metropole/satellite in which Europe is the intentional subject and Latin America its Other. Frank, for example, portrays Europe as the place where capitalist development took place while the rest of the world remained undeveloped, and he views the power of European capitalism through a totalizing lens, as always and everywhere the dominant force bending all to its will. In his article “The Structure of Dependence,” Dos Santos makes the similar claim that “the productive system in the underdeveloped countries is essentially determined by . . . international relations. In the ‹rst place, the need to conserve the agrarian or mining export structure generates a combination between more advanced economic centers that extract surplus value from the more backward sectors, and also between internal ‘metropolitan’ centers and internal interdependent ‘colonial’ centers’” (1970, 234). Here the internal organization of the nation-state is determined by global capital and its “need” to conserve certain forms and banish others. As Dos Santos concludes, “we must see it as part of a system of world economic relations based on monopolistic control of large-scale capital, on control of certain economic and ‹nancial centers over others” (1970, 235). These representations not only perpetuate the Eurocentric idea that Western capitalism is the source of historical change. They also create little room for imagining agency outside of revolution and delinking from the global system. As J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996) has argued in the context of globalization debates (discussed in chap. 5), such representations of Western capital as all-powerful make attempts at resistance by “peripheral” forces seem utopian or destined for defeat. Thus despite their intentions to the contrary, they contribute to a politics of representation in which Latin America remains perpetually peripheral. The retention of essentialist and hierarchical binaries of center/periphery in dependency thought has been widely criticized (e.g., Blomstrom and Hettne 1984). Representations of capitalism as autonomous, dynamic, and rational are counterposed to portraits of the global South as dependent, irrational, and stagnant. Not only does the social essentialism of dependency theory contribute to a view of dependent countries remaining dependent, it also contributes to the fantasy that the countries of Europe and North America are autonomous economic units, calling the shots. Placing

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the West as the liberated Self against which the oppressed Third World subject is characterized as its Other is a standard colonial trope in development thought. Such tropes are also gendered. As Nandy (1983) argues in his analysis of colonialism in Asia, the exaltation of independence, aggression, and the accumulation of power constituted a “hypermasculinity” through which the West represented itself (and the ideal) against the colonized South. The binary logic of center/periphery in dependency thought has similarly been shaped by the gendered duals of nature/culture, reason/emotion, subject/object, and order/anarchy, where the ‹rst term is associated with desired masculine traits and the latter with undesirable feminine ones (Scott 1995, 89). Thus the story of dependency becomes a gendered tale of dominance and submission. Third World countries are represented as the undeveloped victims that are rapaciously and aggressively underdeveloped by Western capitalism. Dependency theory failed to break with the essentialist discourse of development that categorized the modernization arguments theorists were attempting to critique, resulting in a “Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism” that perpetuates gendered colonial representations (Mignolo 2002). They continued to view modernity as a “set of masculine challenges, to be overcome through separation from and then modernization . . . [in which] self-reliance entails the application of science and technology to the inert forces of nature and increasing control over those forces that cause stagnation and underdevelopment” (Scott 1995, 5). A more transformative approach might “resist the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation” and instead recognize the “complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of these often opposed political spheres” (Bhabha 1994, 173). Or to put it in Arif Dirlik’s terms, it would “seek not to homogenize places by the ideologies and practices of larger structures of political economy, but to recognize the logic of heterogeneity” (2001, 15). This project could include a perspective that (1) sees areas in which Europe and North America are not autonomous and all-powerful but rather connected to the world economy and vulnerable and (2) similarly deconstructs the idea of the global South as victim. Further, it could imagine and thus catalogue local noncapitalist practices as sources of resistance to international capital rather than deciding in advance that these willingly serve as handmaidens to the needs of global accumulation. Because of its lack of attention to the complexity of boundaries and the potential hybridity that could emerge in acts of economic, political, and cultural translation and resistance, dependency theorists such as Frank fur-

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ther engage colonial tropes by presenting Europe as the universal model of “normal” autonomous development, as opposed to “pathological” dependent and backward outcomes in the global South. This even extends to narratives about difference within particular Latin American economies. As Frank puts it, the capitalist sector in the dependent economy is its “substance” that creates “essentially unproductive” noncapitalist sites (1969, 22). Capitalism remains the norm against which the noncapitalist is found wanting. In another text, he describes the Latin American Indian class in terms of its “status of inferiority, exploitation, poverty and lack of culture” (1967, 136). Cardoso and Faletto’s typology of different forms of dependent development comes the closest to Bhabha’s idea of hybridity in the following senses: they view economic systems as acts of translation between international, national, and local forces, and they leave some room for agency in the context of imperialism (e.g., “dependent development”and autonomous underdevelopment). But even they fall back into a particular sort of Eurocentric historicism and essentialism by portraying the national productive system characterized by autonomous capitalism as superior, which implicitly suggests that Western Europe is the ideal that the global South should emulate. For most dependency theorists the only force large enough to oppose the power of international capital is the nation-state. According to Kate Manzo, this is further evidence of dependency’s Eurocentrism: “a modernist discourse which relies on the principles of nineteenth century liberal philosophy, which treats the individual nation-state in the Third World as the sovereign subject of development” (1991, 6). The nation-state is presented as a uni‹ed subject in much of dependency thought, as a force with intentional agency, and as a site of rational management of economic futures. This discursive move is not without its ironies. The idea of rational planning in the context of development is often underwritten by representations of the state that excluded an analysis of its political character, its decentralized sites of struggle, its use by bureaucratic elites, and so forth.7 Given that dependency theorists were often critical of the Latin American state’s historical role as the handmaiden of international capital and, further, given their awareness of the historical dif‹culties in the region concerning the creation of stable democracies, they put these concerns front and center. The establishment of a new government through socialist revolution, which would replace the bourgeois state with one that would guide autonomous development, was the primary dependency prescription for the organization of national development. The alliance between foreign

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capital and the national bourgeoisie that controlled the state was de‹ned as an obstacle of development. Here, dependency theorists framed the problem as the removal of obstacles and constraints, where existing governments dominated by the local capitalist class constituted a constraint on the scienti‹c process of development. For instance, Frank argues that it is possible to delink with the capitalist world system and develop via a revolution that would “usher in scienti‹c control . . . at the level of the nation-state” (1969, 150). Cardoso and Faletto, while attentive to class struggle, portray the social classes—bourgeoisie, working class, landowners, and peasants— as rational agents who under the right circumstances can achieve agreement on development plans and policies (1979, 129–30). As Robert Brenner has argued, this conception of rationality is neo-Smithian in that it assumes the “extra-historical universe of homo economicus, outside of any system of social relations of exploitation” (1977, 58). While not sharing exactly the same discursive terrain as the modernization and growth theorists discussed in chapter 2, this characterization of a “rational” socialist state does frame the problem of underdevelopment as potentially subject to rational authoritative planning. In fact, the pathological nature of so-called underdeveloped regions, according to dependency theory, justi‹ed intensive intervention in this regard. The scienti‹c management of the economy, as discussed in the previous two chapters, also relies upon the creation of the economy as an object that can be managed. While international forces make the economies of Latin America “unmanageable” by local governments due to power relations, delinking from the global economy and/or achieving a requisite level of political autonomy is assumed to create the conditions for autonomy, one of which is self-management. These Enlightenment views of the nation as a sovereign subject were augmented by the attachment of dependency theory to economistic representations of political economy as discussed in the preceding and anchored by knowledge of economic “laws of motion” that bolstered the idea that scienti‹c management of the economy toward development was possible. Even Cardoso and Faletto, despite paying more attention to political and cultural factors than other dependency theorists, reproduce the idea of legibility and manageability and thus the developmentalism of modernization theorists with their idea that each nation’s social formation has a graspable “inner logic.” The construction of the national economy as a manageable object in dependency theory, of course, differs from the approach of North Atlantic modernization and growth theory. The dependency school is in›uenced by

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Marxian thought and is likely to express economic logic in terms of class con‹gurations. Modernization theories counterpose traditional and modern, while dependency theorists talk of capitalist versus noncapitalist forces. But dependency theorists’ adherence to the discourse of developmentalism that viewed capitalist industrialization as the goal caused them to reproduce some of the same notions and hierarchies that characterized liberal modernization theory’s view of traditional cultures. Noncapitalist local practices were at best ignored by dependency theory and at worst characterized as backward “tendencies,” set into motion by the pathological effects of global capital and de‹ned as problems to be overcome (Manzo 1995). Dependency theorists argued that a new state, a socialist state, could take into account the concerns of all of the oppressed in Latin America. Assuming that the “proper” state was put into power, dependency theory assumed without much further exploration that it would represent the interests of all (the poor, the Indians, the working class, and the socially marginalized) except for capitalist elites, vendidas (sellouts), who had allied themselves to foreign interests. In this, dependency thinking remained at the level of “state science” that “proceeds by territorializing, creating boundaries and hierarchies, producing certainties, theorems, and identities,” “reproduces the world according to a ‹xed point of view,” and calls upon “the power of a conceptual apparatus of pre-established form of intervention” (Escobar 1995b, 223). As Manzo (1995) contends, this emphasis actually shifted focus away from local struggles in the countries of the global South. Instead, development’s Others were made sense of through a politics of representation that viewed them as drags on the goal of industrialization and economic advancement. In this conception of development, autonomy is linked to industrialization and rational management of the economy creates the effect, as Catherine Scott notes, of sweeping away or making invisible so-called unproductive noncapitalist social relations and practices (1995, 94). This framing of productive and unproductive labor was intimately gendered and raced. Not explicitly, of course—categories such as gender and ethnicity were frequently ignored in the dependency framework or pushed to the margins, explained away as determined by class structure. But a “coloniality of power” existed in Latin America that itself was a major determinant of the economic structure (Quijano 2000). According to Anibal Quijano, colonial power constructed the economy along race lines. People of African descent were categorized as “slaves” and the various indigenous peoples as

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homogenous “Indians,” who were also catalogued as serfs. According to Ramon Grosfoguel (2000; see also Mignolo 2002), this coloniality of power was reproduced in dependency thought. Those non- or antimodern locals, for instance Indians who did not engage in capitalist accumulation strategies, were viewed as second-class citizens, as the nation’s backward Others. Dependency theory’s framing of development as sweeping away backwardness through industrialization portrays these feudal and noncapitalist Others as problems, lacks, and inadequacies that can be solved if capitalism is allowed to penetrate deeply enough into the countryside and destroy their way of life. Frank makes this pitch in a chapter called “On the Indian Problem in Latin America” (1967). Dos Santos writes, “The survival of traditional relations in the countryside is a serious limitation on the size of the market. . . . The productive structure created by dependent industrialization limits the growth of the internal market” (1970, 235). Further, “the development of dependent capitalism reproduces the factors that prevent it [the productive system] from reaching a nationally and internationally advantageous situation; and thus it reproduces backwardness, misery, and social marginalization within its borders” (234). Here, the “problem” is that in its dependent form, capitalism is prevented from going far enough. In this sense, the historical framework of dependency theory, to borrow from Chatterjee, is one that sees the universality of capitalism: although the history of Latin American capitalism is “different from the history of European capitalism, it is nonetheless a history of capitalism” (1993b, 33). Noncapitalist practices and alternatives to capitalism do not have a place here. Either they are so unimportant that they are not recognized, or else they are presented as problems that need to be resolved. Noncapitalist Others should “either be similar to capitalism [and disappear] or be condemned to remain so different that their credentials as genuine economies . . . [are] in doubt” (Mignolo 2002, 76). This move of equating economy with capitalism reinforces the coloniality of power identi‹ed by Quijano by privileging the “European” industrial class in the name of technical progress and superior knowledge. Poor and marginalized regions within the nation-state, where black, mulatto, and Indian populations frequently live, are portrayed as backward or underdeveloped and thus not part of the forward movement of the developmental nation-state. Thus dependency theory, while posing as a locally produced alternative to the mainstream discourses of development, retained an “intellectual colonialism” (Fals Borda 1970) that reproduced the developmentalism of modernization theorists:

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Development assumes a teleology to the extent that it proposes that the “natives” will sooner or later be reformed; at the same time, however, it reproduces endlessly the separation between reformers and those to be reformed by keeping alive the premise of the Third World as having a limited humanity in relation to the accomplished European. (Escobar 1995a, 53–54) Conclusion Dependency theorists’ attempts to break from the capital-is-everything, stage-theoretic perspective of liberal modernization theory transformed development thinking in many quarters of the world during the 1960s and 1970s. The demise of dependency theory as a major paradigm in development thought is often blamed on its radicalism, especially its policy prescription of socialist revolution and delinking from the world economy. In this chapter, I argue that dependency theory’s lack of attention to the politics of representation explains some of its analytical failings. Dependency theorists relied upon many of the developmentalist assumptions they were criticizing. They privileged national development and rational control of the nation-state, thus reproducing the liberal modernization ideal that development is a rational planning process, the transformation of a manageable object. This emphasis on transforming the internal structure of the nation-state impeded their ability to imagine other sorts of transformations that might unfold above or below the level of the nation-state. Dependency theorists’ attachment to a discourse of capitalism as the determining force of history obscured the coloniality of power in the global South as it reproduced Eurocentric narratives and modernization assumptions regarding technology and development. This move also allowed dependency theorists to treat noncapitalist practices as lacking agency, which eased the way for an (analytical) practice in which the Others were swept aside, absorbed by a state that dissolves all difference in a grand narrative of “economic imagined community” on the path to progress. These discursive moves, by replicating some of the assumptions of liberal modernization theories, contributed to the same sorts of discounting, marginalizing maneuvers toward local ideas and practices that dependency theorists were trying to overcome. Instead of providing for a recovery of perspectives from the global South, then, dependency theory participated in processes that submerged many of these perspectives.

FOUR

Structural Adjustment and Its Discontents

In 1991 Lawrence Summers, then chief economist of the World Bank, issued a now-infamous memorandum arguing that the export of toxic waste to the Third World should be encouraged by the World Bank. The basis for this policy recommendation was that the movement of toxic waste to poor countries was economically ef‹cient. The greatest economic cost of toxic waste was identi‹ed as foregone income due to increased illness and mortality; therefore “a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages.” Thus, the memo concluded, “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable.” It would result in a “world-welfare enhancing trade.” Some resistance to such a program, Summers conceded, should be anticipated by the bank. But this was to be dismissed as likely to be based on some fuzzy set of “social concerns” and “moral reasons” that “could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization” (Summers 1992, 66). Since the early 1980s, the governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have implemented structural adjustment liberalization programs, often at the behest of international development institutions such as the World Bank and IMF. The “Washington consensus” that liberalization and market ef‹ciency should be the emphasis of development replaced the 1970s focus on basic needs and inequality (Williamson 1990). This prescription was presented by international development experts and government functionaries as the product of impeccable economic logic. The antistatist, freemarket structural adjustment programs advocated under the Washington consensus have been based on the same economistic and technocratic rea91

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soning, albeit in a less raw form, that was used by Summers to justify the dumping of toxic waste in the Third World. While the late 1990s saw the emergence of a so-called post-Washington consensus that created some space for social concerns as an add-on to adjustment, economistic reasoning continues to determine the boundaries of the debate. Economists who theorize about structural adjustment generally seek to distance themselves from any explicit value-laden claims. Here, they are re›ecting more general trends in the profession. As a historian of twentieth-century economic thought puts it: Not the least of the consequences born of a century of professionalization in economics has been the determination of its mainstream practitioners to rid it of what they take to be political overtones. In place of the unabashed partisanship of its earliest and most illustrious architects . . . contemporary economists have fashioned a method of inquiry and a style of argument that rei‹es the workings of a “free market” to the status of a natural law. (Bernstein 2001, 193) While the portrayal of structural adjustment in economics is generally couched in terms that attempt to deny its embeddedness in any system of political, cultural, or ethical ideas, it is in fact based on a number of such assumptions. The economic “crisis” that structural adjustment attempts to resolve involves more than just an encounter with a pregiven set of economic structures. Rather, the hegemony of this approach during 1980s and 1990s is the product of the universe of acceptable languages and practices that it inhabits. It is framed within a political and cultural discourse with rules (albeit unspoken) for de‹ning interests, recognizing actors, and classifying behaviors. In this chapter, I focus on one particular aspect of structural adjustment: the economic theories that form its analytical underpinnings. The question of how structural adjustment “works”—how economies adjust, the proper pace of adjustment, and/or the economic and social effects of structural adjustment—is not the main focus of this chapter, and I only touch upon a small fraction of the enormous literature on this subject. Instead I am interested in how development economists imagine and present a vision of the world that is purportedly objective but nonetheless re›ects particular social and political values. Structural adjustment is, of course, not reducible to economic discourse. The twenty-year attempt to restructure less developed economies along neoliberal lines re›ects a broad set of in›uences and practices. Structural

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adjustment is a product of the various intentions and interests of governments, classes, corporations, and international development agencies. But it is also the working out of a structure of knowledge that is greatly in›uenced by economic thinking. Ideas of economic rationality (of both the individual economic agent and the scientist), of the logic of the economy, of the necessity to adjust in the face of the new “realities” of global capitalism, of the pursuit of national collective well-being through structural adjustment, and of the ability of Western development experts to engineer and control this process—all of these are included in the set of notions that have become normal and natural ways of thinking through which structural adjustment initiatives are put into practice. Included among these is how economists frame the problems of developing countries in a manner that participates in an expert culture of structural adjustment, one that rests upon the preference for “legibility” discussed in chapter 2 but also contains other elements that are elaborated in the following. I examine the more mainstream approaches of the IMF and World Bank as well as the arguments of two sets of their critics, the neostructuralists and the feminist economists. While both of these critical approaches challenge the narrow “apolitical” focus of the IMF and World Bank, they remain partly enmeshed in the expert culture of structural adjustment in ways that blunt some of their critical potential and ability to imagine and articulate genuine alternatives. The Roads Not Taken Many see structural adjustment, and the knowledge produced by it, as part of an effort to improve the world: to increase economic stability, decrease poverty, boost economic growth, and promote modernization and progress. For these thinkers, the economic theories that inform structural adjustment policies (or any kind of development initiative) are simply tools that can help put an economy on the right path. Those who are involved with constructing macroeconomic models of structural adjustment and/or implementing these programs at the IMF and World Bank generally fall into this camp. They see the construction of development macroeconomic models and the policies that emanate from them as being grounded in the empirical reality of developing economies (in the sense that they allow for accurate prediction and explanation of economic phenomena) and believe that any false assumptions or incorrect prescriptions will be discovered and corrected. The intention of both model builders and international develop-

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ment institutions, according to this approach, is to achieve successful outcomes in terms of macroeconomic stability (low in›ation and unemployment, external sector and ‹scal balance, and a sound ‹nancial system), and this intention is re›ected in word and deed. The only reason to analyze structural adjustment, therefore, is to avoid failures and maximize success. An analysis of stabilization and economic restructuring programs by Stanley Fischer provides a paradigmatic example of this conceptual approach. Fischer argues that policymakers have learned some key lessons from the 1980s that will allow them to make better policies in the 1990s. These lessons include the realization that stabilization (elimination of external imbalances and in›ation) must be undertaken quickly and decisively, at the ‹rst sign of trouble; that ‹scal contraction is the key policy variable that will ensure success in this area; that some limited programs should be kept in order to help the poor during the adjustment process; that the ‹nancial aid and expertise of the World Bank and IMF have helped to ease the pain of adjustment; that the international ‹nancial institutions (IFIs) should craft policy in a way that suggests that the countries “own” these policies, that they are not forced on the people against their will; and, ‹nally, that foreign direct investment is a key factor in promoting growth and measures should be implemented to encourage such investment (Fischer 1995). He concludes: The 1990s will see the debt problem signi‹cantly reduced, thereby making it easier for countries to undertake the adjustments they should, in any case, make as rapidly as possible, and will see more countries that have persisted with adjustment breaking through into renewed and sustainable growth. (31) The unspoken assumption is that the intention of structural adjustment is to improve the economies of the South and the lives of the people who live there. Mistakes might have been made in the past. However, as the story goes, economists and policymakers learn from mistakes and are able to arrive at closer approximations of the truth of the economy. Because of these advances in science, the IMF and World Bank are assumed to be better equipped to assist countries into a period of “renewed and sustainable growth” in the 1990s. Fischer, of course, is no foe of the policy regime developed within the Bretton Woods institutions—among his other connections within the development industry, he held the post of deputy managing director of the

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IMF for a number of years. More critical voices do, however, operate within the same conceptual framework as Fischer, in the sense that they believe in the good intentions of structural adjustment policy and are attempting to ‹x theory and policy so that these intentions bear fruit. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, for instance, has been vocally critical of the structural adjustment policies implemented by the World Bank and IMF in Sub-Saharan Africa (UNECA 1989). The ECA’s analysis of the situation leads to the conclusion that adjustment has failed in this region because not enough attention was paid to the realities of the situation. Suggestions are offered, such as including land reform in restructuring packages as well as boosting trade between African nations and providing credit and agricultural assistance to farmers. But while the ECA is critical, its goal is not meant to subvert structural adjustment but to make it work better. As F. Tarp points out, its critique does not differ much from the views of the World Bank on this subject (1993, 145). Joseph Stiglitz’s criticisms of structural adjustment, particularly as it has been imagined and carried out by the IMF, position him as a rebel. Stiglitz issued such a potent criticism of the IMF’s failures with regard to the East Asian crisis that he was asked to resign from his job at the IMF’s sister institution, the World Bank, by Bank president James Wolfensohn. Stiglitz focuses on the use of a simplistic free-market ideology in IMF models and their corresponding lack of familiarity with local conditions and institutional factors. He calls for a more complicated analysis, one based on knowledge about the economies being adjusted, with a more balanced approach to the role of state and market. He is also in favor of making the IFIs more accountable to their publics (Stiglitz 2002). But Stiglitz’s rebellion remains within the broad discursive contours of development macroeconomics. He is not calling structural adjustment into question so much as arguing for a particular sort of reform. Even the neostructuralist macroeconomist Lance Taylor, who de‹nes himself on the “outside” of mainstream structural adjustment, ‹ts into this camp—again, only in the sense that his work attempts to ‹x structural adjustment. Taylor’s plea to include institutional content in adjustment models and to focus on practical and socially relevant policy sets him apart from the crowd (although not that far from Stiglitz), as does his policy prescription (for instance, he favors state intervention in situations where most of the others denounce it). Still, his goal is to improve the process of structural adjustment with better policy and implementation. It is in this sense that Taylor takes as given the potential of structural adjustment for the

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expression of good intentions through successful policy-making (see, for example, Taylor 1987 and 1995). There is another way of approaching the question of structural adjustment, one that sees it not as a set of practices aimed at helping developing economies but as a tool that contributes to continued capitalist exploitation of the Third World. Structural adjustment, from this perspective, furthers the goals of capital ‹rst and foremost: Structural adjustment is a policy to continue colonial trade and economic patterns developed during the colonial period, but which the Northern powers want to continue in the post-colonial period. . . . The World Bank and IMF are playing the role that our ex-colonial masters used to play. (Khor, cited in Danaher 1994, 28) The new policy regime of structural adjustment is viewed here as just one more in a long line of so-called development initiatives aimed at securing the conditions for capitalist pro‹tability in the countries of Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, while thwarting true development in those places. Within this framework, structural adjustment policy in all of its different forms (“shock treatment,” “gradualism,” “adjustment with a human face,” and so forth) is explained as re›ecting the logic and needs of capitalism. It is not the cure but rather the cause of increased poverty, insecurity, economic stagnation, and political and economic instability. The economic theories that support such policies exist only to provide another layer of mystifying rhetoric. Development economists who purvey these theories must, by de‹nition, be working for capitalism. Economic theory simply functions as a smokescreen for the capitalist agenda (Danaher 1994; George 1990). The perspective taken in this chapter can be contrasted with both of these views of structural adjustment in that it is located in an intellectual terrain outside of this debate. The concern here is not whether structural adjustment is a benevolent force that can be reformed or a source of exploitation to be denounced. It is not only the representation of certain directed interests but rather a more complex and contradictory structure of knowledge and practice. By this I do not mean to suggest that there are not any interests involved in the working out of structural adjustment. The interests of certain actors in this arena can sometimes be very clear. How-

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ever, the relationship between these interests and development macroeconomic theories is not as obvious as the critics claim. We cannot take structural adjustment at its word, but neither can we assume a simple correspondence between the desires of capital and the structure of policy. Thus there is a need to investigate more carefully the structure of thought that generates policy statements. An emerging literature is engaged in precisely this kind of investigation with regard to the projects of development in the global South. This interdisciplinary program has begun to chart the relationship between the production of knowledge about the global South and development policy (Escobar 1995a; Ferguson 1990; Sachs 1992; Marchand and Parpart 1995). The authors do not explicitly address the topic of this chapter, but their writing provides a framework for understanding the broader context within which economic theory statements about structural adjustment have meaning. In a somewhat similar vein, a number of economists have begun to challenge the dominant view that economic theory presents a value-free re›ection of economic reality; instead they view economic knowledge as a constructed object. The rhetoric approach of D. McCloskey (1985), the critique of physics metaphors in economics as exempli‹ed by Philip Mirowski (1984), the investigation of analytical entry points by Resnick and Wolff (1987), the postmodern critique of modern economics by Amariglio and Ruccio (1994), and the feminist examination of the masculinist biases of economic science (Ferber and Nelson 1993; Barker and Kuiper 2003) have all provided trenchant critiques of the positivism of modern economics. This is not to say that economists are busy interrogating development economics as a discourse. Most of the current work in economics focuses on the rhetorics and narratives of “high theory,” not applied work in the sub‹elds. However, the inquiry into distinctive styles of reasoning in economics shows that they contribute to the construction of particular scienti‹c norms, subjectivities, and goals that both objectify economies and individuals and push alternative perspectives to the margins. In the next section, I provide an investigation of how the presentation of economic knowledge in development macroeconomic models contributes to a particular way of seeing the developing economy. The following sections provide summaries of the analytical foundations of the IMF, World Bank, and neostructuralist approaches to structural adjustment alongside an analysis of how their various model answers re›ect and participate in an expert culture of development thought.

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Model Answers: Development Macroeconomics, Objectivity, and Expert Knowledge The scientist questions the validity of narrative statements and concludes that they are never subject to argumentation and proof. He classi‹es them as belonging to a different mentality. . . . Narratives are fables, myths, legends, ‹t only for women and children. —J. F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

One of the ‹rst things that a student of the economic theories that underlie structural adjustment notices is the extent to which adjustment relies on model answers. The presentation of economic theories within formal models is not, of course, limited to development macroeconomics. Formalization and mathematization of economic concepts is a relatively generalizable aspect of much post-Samuelsonian modern economic theorizing and, as discussed in chapter 2, has been a characteristic of development economics since its emergence as a distinct sub‹eld after World War II. The conventional language of mathematics has come to signify the most transparent form of presentation because it supposedly sidesteps values and ideologies, creating a mirrorlike re›ection of reality that has universal validity (McCloskey 1985; Ruccio 1988). Some economists have questioned the assumption that mathematical language mirrors nature. Building on the work of linguistic theorists, economists such as William Milberg (1988), Jane Rosetti (1990), and David Ruccio (1988) have argued that the presentation of economic concepts in mathematical models contributes to a particular social determination of meaning rather than providing a neutral vehicle for the innocent re›ection of reality. It is a particular language game, meant to convey the detached stance of the author. Further, mathematical knowledge can dictate the direction of economic thought and the scope of theory. For instance, those problems that are classi‹ed as noneconomic are often those that cannot be represented in an economic model. The questions I ask in this section of the chapter focus on processes of representation in development macroeconomic models. Here the concern is not so much with whether these models are realistic or not. Instead, the focus is on whether and how model answers contribute to a particular sort of culture of expertise in development macroeconomics and, by association, structural adjustment. The presentation of the models in this section also provides a context for the rest of the chapter. First, a reminder. There is a relationship between economic models and structural adjustment policies. However, policymakers do not base all of

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their decisions on models. They do, however, depend on models to provide information about possible policy responses, economic relationships, and tradeoffs. They also use models to frame policy regimes. As Fischer (1987) notes: The likelihood that the economy will achieve targets derived using models is of course slight. Policy mistakes or other shocks will produce deviations of outcomes from target levels. But the models enforce discipline on the analysis of adjustment, ensure the consistency of policy measures, and provide a framework in which the prospects of meeting balance of payments and growth targets can be coherently discussed. (173) Fischer hints that policies will probably not achieve the outcomes speci‹ed by the models. However, this is not because the models are wrong. In fact, the passage seems to suggest that the models are on balance correct. “Deviations” from model expectations will be due to “policy mistakes” and/or unanticipated shocks, not from incorrect model speci‹cations. While models might not be able to accurately predict outcomes because of these outside issues, they are, according to the passage, still useful. They facilitate conversation. They also enforce discipline on the way that we think about adjustment. I am also interested in the ways that economic models enforce discipline on discussions of structural adjustment, although I suspect that my use of the term might carry a somewhat different meaning than Fischer’s. For instance, how does the use of formal, mathematical models enforce discipline in terms of who can participate in the conversation on structural adjustment? Fischer states that models foster discussion and debate about policies. But the IMF and World Bank do not share the economic model that underlies a speci‹c structural adjustment policy with the borrowing country (Mills and Nallari 1992), and the IMF does not call for any local participation in developing its policies (Stiglitz 2002). Knowing this, one might then ask, “discussion and debate among what groups?” If borrowing countries’ governments (not to mention peoples) do not see the models that provide the “framework in which the prospects of meeting . . . targets can be coherently discussed,” then a fairly limited group of individuals is participating in this discussion. I am not suggesting, necessarily, that the conversation be expanded by persuading the World Bank to hand out copies of its macroeconomic

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model in the streets of Dakar. The knowledge produced within the academic discipline of economics is different from (although one might argue, no more coherent than) the economic knowledge produced by the person on the street (Klamer and Leonard 1994; Amariglio and Ruccio 1999; Gudeman and Rivera 1990). Noneconomists have not been initiated into the rituals of truth of modern economic theory construction. And most of us (with the exception of some new classical economists) would not expect them to think in the same model terms as trained economists. If the production of macroeconomic knowledge in the mathematical mode sets the boundaries of the debate on structural adjustment, it does so in ways that are more subtle and powerful than the ability to leave out, confuse, and/or alienate the nonspecialist with economic jargon and mathematics. As Ruccio (1988) has pointed out, the use of formal mathematical models by economists suggests a level of technical con‹dence. Mathematical models portray the certainty of knowledge (i.e., that the essential principles of the economy are well understood). The reduction of a problem to a set of supposedly essential principles frames knowledge in particular ways. For one thing, following James Scott’s (1998) analysis of high-modernist social-scienti‹c practices as discussed in chapter 2, it makes developing economies and the adjustment process into something that is legible and thus manageable. As D. Schon has noted, model answers have “falsely reduced the full range of uncertainties to the more comforting illusion of controllable but deterministic processes” (1982, 116). In addition, the portrayal of economic knowledge in an abstract and formal manner suggests that we are being offered an objective and value-free set of assessments and solutions to the problems at hand. The model is a technical exercise, separate from values, interests, and power relations. Other modes of presentation and analysis are by contrast viewed as value-laden, nonscienti‹c arguments. For example, in the typical portrayal of the developing country macroeconomy in the structural adjustment literature, most macroeconomic models for developing economies use the same “map.” They take as a starting point the existence of at least four sectors in the economy and the relationships between them: the private non‹nancial sector, the government, the domestic monetary system, and the foreign sector (Mills and Nallari 1992). Given these sectors, models revolve around the macroeconomic accounts that specify national balance, external balance, monetary balance, and ‹scal balance (Easterly 1989, 3). These form the analytical underpinnings of short-term adjustment strategies of resolving in›ation and balance of payments, as well as the longer-term growth and restructuring models.1

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These balance equations do not amount to a predictive model because no causal relationships are speci‹ed. They do not tell us how adjustment will take place. As such they constitute an “empty” framework—one that simply lays out the sectors of the macroeconomy and some of their interrelationships. But even before examining how this empty framework is transformed into a causal model, there are some features of it that can be commented on. For one thing, such a representation of the macroeconomy confers an arm’s-length detachment and an aura of objectivity onto the proceedings. The portrayal of the economy through even this simplest model of the macroeconomy hinges on a correspondence between the object being studied and the model. The representation style suggests that there is very little “noise” in terms of values, personal preferences, or literary tropes that has been able to sneak in and warp this correspondence. As McCloskey has noted, economists understand their model way of talking as the way to produce a supposedly detached scienti‹c knowledge of their subject (1985, 4–8). In addition to the presumption of neutrality that is ascribed to mathematical models, there is another factor at work that lends to the aura of objectivity. Like most conventional representations of the economy, an inherent feature of even the empty framework places the macroeconomist (and reader) outside of the national economy, looking in. It is not a view from within a particular place in the economy (with all its connotations of being emeshed within a constellation of interest and power relations) but rather a view from above and outside, what feminist philosopher Susan Bordo (1987) refers to as “a view from nowhere.” Thus what we are presented with in even the most simple macroeconomic model is by this point in the book a familiar object of development—the disembedded national economy, represented as if it is being viewed in its totality (or at least all of the aspects that are considered important) by a detached consciousness that is standing outside of it. This ideal of detachment in economics (and the representations that underwrite it) has come under scrutiny as of late (McCloskey 1994; Ferber and Nelson 1993; Barker and Kuiper 2003). Building on the insights of feminist philosophers (Harding 1988; Bordo 1987; Fox Keller 1985), critics argue that far from being value-free inquiry, modern economics is based on a particular set of values that view the abstract, general, detached, dispassionate, and masculinist approach to inquiry as superior to the particular, concrete, and connected feminist approach. Presentations of the national economy as an object spread out before the

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economist for examination neatly ‹t the Cartesian framework that feminist philosophers have criticized. The feminist view of knowledge production as a cultural process helps to underscore the point being made about development macroeconomics and its role in the expert culture of structural adjustment. Model answers help to underwrite the idea that economists are producing a detached knowledge above the particular and connected concerns that are often expressed by noneconomists. Economic knowledge is presented as a universal rationality that stands above the fray. Against model knowledge and its aura of objectivity, other knowledges and other perspectives are judged (and even come to judge themselves) and are found wanting. It is in part through this set of knowledge practices that other representations and perspectives (and their nondetached social and moral concerns) are often discounted and marginalized in discussions about structural adjustment. Model answers in structural adjustment are more than just the presentation of knowledge in a particular (detached, scienti‹c) style. They also contribute to a way of thinking about the economy as a manageable, ordered site. In this the mathematical models of developing country macroeconomies are more than representations, they are constructions. Of course all models are by de‹nition partial views of the world: they are simpli‹cations. My goal in this chapter is not to condemn economic theory for “leaving things out.” Instead, it is to show the particular kinds of stories they produce about development, the economy, the economic scientist, and the policymaker. The IMF and World Bank Approaches A discussion of how the models of the IMF and World Bank add causal assumptions to the empty framework will allow us to see these stories in better relief. The IMF has overseen over one hundred stabilization programs in Latin America, Africa, and Asia over the past two decades. The analytical underpinning of these policies is a variant of the Polak model of ‹nancial programming, which, as Lance Taylor (1987) points out, is one of the most in›uential (if relatively unknown) works in economics since Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The model focuses on short-term stabilization issues—returning an economy to a sustainable balance of payments position in the world economy and bringing down in›ation—although in the 1990s it also became more concerned with achieving the longer-term goal of “growth-oriented adjustment” (IMF

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1990, 21). The growth-oriented adjustment framework often relies upon a merged World Bank–IMF model as its analytical underpinnings (Agénor and Montiel 1996, 302–7). All of these models are primarily neoclassical in their theoretical orientation. In the IMF world, the cause of in›ation and external imbalance is excessive government spending that has been funded either through borrowing or by monetizing the debt. This causes an increase in domestic income but also creates an imbalance between domestic income and the amount of goods and services available. The solution to the in›ation and balance of payments problem is ‹scal and monetary austerity. The IMF focuses on the exchange rate, the government budget, and domestic credit as key policy variables used to achieve target goals. Financial programming is then undertaken. This is the process of ‹nding the values of policy instruments and then the desired target levels by using the following steps: 1. Specify the desired reserve (R) and price levels; 2. Project the value of exogenous variables for the entire adjustment period. Exogenous variables are those that are assumed not to be affected by variables within the model. These include real GDP (the growth rate is given by things like technology, productivity of labor and other factors outside the model), the availability of foreign loans, government interest payments on the debt, external transfers, and the non-price determinants of demand for the country’s exports; 3. Calculate the amount of devaluation needed to achieve the goals in (1) given the values speci‹ed in (2). Devaluation will increase exports and decrease imports thus bringing the country closer to balancing the current account; 4. Calculate the ensuing price level changes from devaluation (impact on domestic and imported goods prices with a change in the exchange rate); 5. Calculate the credit ceiling required to achieve a target level of reserves; 6. Determine the public sector budget constraint and adjust government spending accordingly. (Mills and Nallari 1992, 82) This model is clearly neoclassical, although it is not a supply-side model in the sense that it focuses on demand restraint as the key to restoring macroeconomic balances (Khan, Montiel, and Haque 1990). A key analyt-

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ical underpinning of this model is its neoclassical behavioral assumption of market ›exibility. Prices in the IMF model are assumed to be determined by the market forces for both traded and nontraded goods, where prices are established in a ›exible, market-clearing, and perfectly competitive manner. Rigid wages or goods prices (the latter due to mark-up pricing in noncompetitive markets) are not considered possible. Consumers, workers, and ‹rms are considered to be rational and to respond to policies in predictable ways (i.e., adjusting their behavior according to cost/bene‹t calculations) (Mills and Nallari 1992, 83). The model does not take into account the existence of any uncertainty in this decision-making process. The outcome of all of this rational behavior is equilibrium in all markets. The assumption that it is human nature in some kind of global sense to behave in a rational, calculating manner is key to neoclassical development macroeconomics. This point has been underscored in a recent state-of-theart development macroeconomics textbook by P. Agénor and P. Montiel, who contrast their view—“we do not believe that economic agents in developing countries behave . . . in ways that are inconsistent with rational optimizing principles of neoclassical economics”—with the “old and discredited claim from the 1960s that developing countries are ‘populated by nonoptimizing—and non-rational—economic agents’” (1996, 11). Optimizing behavior is the basis, the ‹rst principle, of the model. As P. Mirowski (1984) has shown, the basis for the mathematical technique of constrained optimization is provided by the ‹rst law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy. Neoclassical microeconomists simply borrowed the idea and used it as a metaphor for human behavior. They rede‹ned utility so as to be identical with energy. By substituting utility (individual well-being) for energy in the constrained maximization equation, neoclassical economics is able to discover the most ef‹cient and rational actions of producers and consumers. The only thing that would prevent this equilibrium from occurring would be a constraint on the system that prevents markets from clearing. Structural adjustment, of course, aims to eliminate such constraints. Many analysts contend that the description of the developing country macroeconomy in the IMF model is wildly unrealistic and, as such, forms a poor basis for effective policy. Taylor (1987), for example, has argued that the model fails to take into account certain key issues in the developing country context (such as the important role of imported inputs) and that IMF policies can exacerbate in›ation through rising production costs (stag›ation) because of this omission. Carlos Diaz-Alejandro (1981)

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expresses concern with the IMF’s “overkilling” of domestic demand, citing that policies aimed at reducing demand through cuts in government spending, decreases in money supply, and devaluation decrease domestic consumption and investment more than is necessary to achieve stability. Manuel Pastor (1987), along with William Darity and B. Horn (1988), has argued that the IMF’s emphasis on the developing country government as the destabilizing element ignores the important role that external actors such as international investors have played in this regard. The IMF has also been widely criticized for its lack of attention to distributional issues in adjustment (due to its assumption that the distribution of income will be relatively unchanged in the adjustment process) and the negative impact its policies have had on lower-income groups in developing countries (e.g., Brandt Commission 1980; Cornia, Jolly, and Stewart 1987). The model put forth by the IMF to capture the macroeconomic fundamentals of the developing country and serve as a basis for stabilization policy may certainly present a wrong or distorted view of reality and/or a foundation for ineffective or disastrous economic policy choices. However, the representation of the developing economy that emerges from the IMF model cannot be understood as simply the product of mistakes or errors. Nor can we understand the IMF approach and the “failures” of its analytical underpinnings as due to their lack of sophistication when compared with academic macroeconomic accounts, as Rudiger Dornbusch has suggested (1990, cited in Mills and Nallari 1992, 44).2 Instead, we need to examine the conditions within which its model explanations carry “weight,” and within certain institutional conditions seem logical and comprehensible. The ‹rst thing that the presentation of model answers by the IMF accomplishes is to give this knowledge an aura of objectivity. The IMF model is a view of the national economy as a disembedded entity, an object that can be viewed in its entirety by a dispassionate scientist who stands outside of it. As discussed in previous chapters, development’s conceptual use of the national economy as that object has become such a natural part of the way that the issues and problems of development are portrayed that it is generally taken for granted. It is always “Uruguay’s problems,” “Uruguay’s options,” “Uruguay’s dependence on foreign investment,”or “Uruguay’s economy”: Uruguay suffered from a prolonged period of stagnation from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. A combined internal-external crisis with

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common symptoms (low growth, high in›ation, large ‹scal de‹cit, declining foreign exchange reserves) triggered a major reform effort in 1974. Between 1974 and 1978 Uruguay carried out an orthodox adjustment program, coupled with structural reform. The combination of orthodox adjustment and structural reform led to improved growth performance for Uruguay during this period. (Agénor and Montiel 1996, 287) This sort of rhetoric is not simply reserved for the “soft” discussion section of an economic development text, for it also animates the mathematically based analytical foundations of development theory and policy. For example, in the mathematical model in Agénor and Montiel’s text that is used to evaluate a disin›ation program we ‹nd a set of behavioral assumptions about a so-called representative household whose fortunes rise and fall with that of the national economy. The use of a representative household model does more than create a legible economic object through a simplifying assumption. It also implicitly suggests a national harmony of interests, as if every household in the economy will be affected similarly by changes in the nation’s exchange rate, proportion of traded to nontraded goods, real transfers from the government, the domestic interest rate, and the international interest rate (1996, 345–46). The representative household approach used by Agénor and Montiel is a variant of the representative agent model that became a staple of New Classical free-market economic thinking in the 1980s. New Classical economists such as Robert Barro and X. Sala i Martin (1995) and Robert Lucas (1988) analyzed macroeconomic performance based on the well-being of a representative agent who re›ects the behavior in, and the outcomes of, aggregates such as overall consumption and investment, as well as the ways that these aggregates interact. The representative agent model also creates narratives about overall economic outcome and speaks meaningfully about shared outcomes through a representative agent who bene‹ts when unemployment falls and when GDP rises. Grounded in a free-market approach to economics, this way of framing economic outcomes in terms of national aggregates supports a different political position than earlier, Keynesianinspired characterizations of national harmony, but at the same time it lends itself to a similar discursive strategy regarding the construction of a harmonious, cohesive economic collective within the boundaries of the nation-state, a construction that, among other things, provides a palliative, calming narrative of the nature of adjustment that downplays con›ict.

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Representative agent models can be compared with Paul Samuelson’s idea of social indifference curves, which were discussed brie›y in chapter 1. Samuelson (1956) posits that the preferences of nations can be theorized in much the same way as individual preferences, based on national tastes and income. He begins his analysis with skepticism at the very idea and argues that such a representation can only make sense in one of the following conditions: (1) if the country is made up of only one person, (2) if all the people in the country have identical tastes, or (3) if a dictator makes all the decisions for the nation. How then does Samuelson come to support the idea that such a social indifference curve would adequately represent national preferences? By using the analogy of family decision making. He argues that while the individual preferences of the members of a family may be diverse, there are decisions made for the good of the family to which everyone agrees; thus outcomes are harmonious, and essentially the family acts as a single unit. He then asserts that the nation is conceptually similar to a family. Armed with the metaphor of the national economy as family (and a rigorous mathematical proof), Samuelson is able to de‹ne social indifference curves for the nation that have all the regularity of individual indifference curves and can be used as a basis for macroeconomic policy that will maximize the well-being of all citizens in the national economy. This narrative of inclusivity, as Samuelson’s own conceptual linking suggests, mirrors economists’ treatments of the household as a black box, an obvious and natural social entity that generates mutually agreeable rewards and tradeoffs. Gary Becker’s (1991) analysis of the economics of the household exempli‹es this type of approach to the household. In Becker’s model, collective household decisions are made by a “benevolent dictator” for the mutual bene‹t of all members of the household. The family behaves as if it were an individual. There is no struggle or con›ict within the family in this view. As mentioned in chapter 1, feminist economists have criticized this representation of the family on many fronts, including its assumption of harmony in a site that feminist analysis has shown to be characterized by power and con›ict. Similarly, the representative household and social indifference curve models push notions of power and con›ict to the margins in the understandings they create about the national economy. William Darity (1995) has suggested that reconsidering agents in terms of gender might change the model of behavior in macroeconomics, but maintaining the idea of aggregate agents in either a Keynesian or a New Classical framework means that differences—whether based on gender, race, or class—will still be pushed to the margins. This similarity in

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outcome occurs despite the deep political differences between these two approaches. Samuelson utilizes social indifference curves in the context of justifying government intervention, while the New Classicals utilize the representative household as a way of justifying liberalization. Yet both contribute to a similar way of seeing the national economy as a site of social and economic harmony. So when development economists ask, “What should Uruguay do?” or “How did Uruguay fare after a policy change was initiated?” one should consider the questions that lie unexplored beneath such formulations: “What should the elites who rule Uruguay do?” and “What should the unemployed do?” and “How did the economic well-being of women in Uruguay change from 1974 to 1978 relative to men?” and “How did this policy affect migrant workers from Bolivia?” and any number of other questions. As James Tobin’s critique of representative agent models contends, there are groups in the economy with distinct characteristics and goals whose interests are lost in economic theories that presume a national unity and, implicitly, a national harmony of interests (Tobin 1980). But the ways that many development economists of all political stripes have framed their models and analyses have tended to push these sorts of questions and concerns to the margins. Representations of the national economy as a cohesive unit, managerial object, and individual agent writ large are not, of course, limited to development or even macroeconomic modeling discourse. They are found in a whole host of economic arguments because they re›ect a sort of “unspoken common sense” about the space and character of the economy in contemporary social thought. Shackle, using a common analogy to demonstrate the theory of comparative advantage, states: A person, or a nation which desires good B can get more of it, for the same trouble, by making good A and exchanging it. These persons, or nations, will be gainers by specializing. (1973, 99) This economic rhetoric, by implicitly suggesting that nations, like persons, have uni‹ed desires and experience uni‹ed outcomes, downplays the differential effects of economic change within the national economy. It also stabilizes presentations of the economy as something that is understandable, predictable, and controllable. A relationship between policy variables (exchange rates, credit controls, and ‹scal austerity) and targets (balance of payments and price level) is speci‹ed based on fairly certain knowledge of

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the economy. Other factors in the macroeconomy are assumed to be unaffected by the policy variables, with no potentially disruptive feedback among real output, prices, and the monetary sector. Because limited effects of policy are speci‹ed in the model, outcomes are not chaotic, with multiple and contradictory effects, but rather predictable and orderly. Changes are wrought on the economy through adjustments in these policy factors to achieve the IMF’s desired outcomes. The IMF has admitted that there might be lags, differing from case to case, between implementation and results but that these can be understood and prepared for through forecasting estimates of possible outcomes (IMF 1987, 13). Otherwise, it is assumed that targets will be met through an orderly and manageable process. The assumptions of the model see the cause of imbalances as policy failure on the part of the government. The overheating of demand by bad government policy is the source of external and internal imbalances. The causes of “high in›ation, sluggish growth and external disequilibrium” are, according to an IMF study, “inappropriate developments in monetary aggregates” (IMF 1990, 7). “Inappropriate developments in monetary aggregates” is a euphemism, of course, for bad monetary policy. The same study states, the results of ‹scal policy intervention in developing countries has been far from favorable. Indeed, substantial evidence exists that in many cases poor ‹scal management has been a major factor underlying problems of internal and external balance. Consequently, there is a need to focus on ‹scal policy both as a possible source of disequilibrium and as a major tool of achieving growth-oriented adjustment. (21) Not once does the study quoted here (which is an overview of issues in adjustment) mention anything other than inappropriate monetary, ‹scal, or exchange rate policy as the source of instability and/or low growth. The report even blames government for the vulnerability due to lack of export diversi‹cation in countries that depend on only one or two crops for foreign exchange such as Senegal (groundnuts), the Ivory Coast (cocoa and coffee), and Iran (oil) (IMF 1990, 53). For these countries, “export diversi‹cation may be best served by eliminating existing distortions that adversely affect incentives for new and ef‹cient industries. Establishment of a realistic exchange rate and liberalization are particularly important in this context” (54). It is not their legacy of colonialism, nor their postcolo-

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nial trade relationships with the West, nor previous World Bank–inspired development initiatives that encouraged monocrop agriculture that is the source of economic instability. No, all is laid at the feet of government, its inappropriate policies sti›ing initiative. This view of causes and effects presupposes that imbalances result uniquely from factors that are in the government’s control and that all that is needed to restore stability is a judicious measure of government policies that will counteract these imbalances with minimal pain (cutting the budget, devaluing the exchange rate, or decreasing the availability of domestic credit through monetary policy).3 This limits the analysis in ways that leave out the role of things as basic as supply shocks that may impact the economy, as well as other factors “outside” the government’s control or manipulation. It also assumes that the government has the ability to solve the problem. “Correctional” government policy is considered the key to restoring balance through its ability to set credit controls, devalue, and cut the budget. In fact, the model assumes that the main features of the economy are under the control of an effective (or at least potentially effective) national government and are thus responsive to the IMF’s policy prescriptions. Despite their strong antistatist rhetoric, development agencies like the IMF and World Bank operate through governments. They tend to emphasize the power of national policy instruments and have little use for alternative narratives that stress the role of unmanageable extragovernmental or extranational forces. The IMF approach has, as noted in the preceding, been criticized for what many perceive to be its excessiveness in this regard, with its attachment to a universal model of the developing economy, a strict equilibrium framework, and an approach to policy-making based on the certainty of projected outcomes. Other models of structural adjustment, such as the World Bank models, have been described as less mechanical, more complicated, and, in the views of their proponents, more “realistic” than the IMF model (Stiglitz 2002). I turn brie›y to these before continuing the discussion of the relationship between model answers and the culture of expertise in structural adjustment. The World Bank was founded to ‹nance long-term development projects, but since the 1980s it has participated in the formation and implementation of over one hundred structural adjustment initiatives. Unlike the IMF, which has been primarily concerned with short-term stabilization issues (with, in the past ten years, an eye toward setting the foundation for

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longer-term growth), the World Bank sees its mandate as not only helping countries restore “balance” but then implementing a program of structural reform to ensure that imbalances will not reoccur. The model used by the World Bank thus differs from that of the IMF. In essence, the World Bank model takes real GDP as its target goal (in the IMF model real GDP is considered exogenous) and then estimates the levels of investment, imports, and foreign investment needed to reach that goal. Unlike the ‹nancial programming approach of the IMF, the World Bank’s model emphasizes growth and supply-side issues in an attempt to establish economic balances in an orderly and predictable manner. Much of the emphasis is on the structural and institutional constraints that interfere with market outcomes that must be eliminated before any real growth can happen. Because of this orientation, the World Bank approach involves more concern with various micro-, meso-, and macroeconomic structural and institutional issues, which has resulted in World Bank conditionality agreements being more detailed than those of the IMF. While this has caused some to charge the World Bank with being excessively meddlesome (Ferguson 1990), others such as Tarp (1993), Syrquin, Taylor, and Westphal (1984), and Stiglitz (2002) see the World Bank’s approach as more moderate and less ideological than that of the IMF. The World Bank uses a variant of the Revised Minimum Standard Model (RMSM) as the analytical underpinning of its policy prescriptions. There is also a merged World Bank–IMF model (Khan and Montiel 1989) that is sometimes relied upon, but the RMSM is the standard. It was originally constructed by Hollis Chenery at the World Bank in the 1970s to provide a consistent tool for making World Bank country growth projections. It is one of a class of what are called “economywide models” that capture the relationships between different sectors in the national economy and feedback mechanisms, as ‹rst developed by Chenery and Bruno (1966) and discussed in the context of growth theory in chapter 2. Originally, the model had a limited number of variables, but today the basic model contains up to 430 variables (Addison 1989, 1). Real output (GDP) is the targeted variable in this model, so a desired expected change in growth is set in place. Then, the model aims at ‹lling gaps by suggesting target levels of savings and foreign capital in›ow to both achieve the growth target and restore macroeconomic balance to the economy. The closure mechanism of the model is based on increasing foreign investment in the borrowing country. Developing countries might need foreign exchange not only to supplement investment but also to ‹nance

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imports. The following summarizes the other major steps taken to program this model: 1. Target levels of growth and balance of payments are speci‹ed. 2. The incremental capital/output ratio is estimated in order to determine both the current and projected levels of ef‹ciency. It is assumed that growth is primarily a function of the capital/output ratio, a holdover from this model’s roots, the Harrod-Domar growth model. The marginal propensity to import as well as the projected level of exports are also estimated. 3. The required levels of investment and imports must be calculated. Investment can be disaggregated into different sectors (such as agriculture, industry, and so forth). Imports can be divided into capital, intermediate, and consumer goods. 4. On the basis of these estimates and calculations, the feasible level of consumption is calculated. Generally the component of this that is considered the “adjusting variable” is consumption-related imports. 5. Finally, the balance of payments is brought into the analysis in order to determine that imports can be ‹nanced (Addison 1989, 2–27). Not surprisingly, given the World Bank’s history of providing international capital with investment opportunities in the Third World by brokering loans and serving as a credit-rating institution, this closure is based on increasing foreign investment in the borrowing country as a way of resolving imbalances. Other key features of the model should be mentioned. First, as noted in the preceding, this model is an adaptation of the HarrodDomar growth model that has been used by the World Bank since the 1950s. This model, as discussed in chapter 2, is based on the simplifying assumptions of a one-good economy and competitive full-employment equilibrium (Jones 1975, 50–62). The RMSM is different from HarrodDomar in that it recognizes more than just a “savings gap” and also because it can disaggregate the economy into different sectors. But the basic thrust of the model is the same. For instance it retains the “capital is everything” approach to growth and the idea that all a developing economy needs is “gap-‹llers.” Also, as Edmar Bacha (1984) points out, the RMSM contains the same assumption of full-employment equilibrium (in all but the foreign and ‹nancial markets) as its Harrod-Domar predecessor.

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This assumption about equilibrium rests upon the neoclassical idea of human nature that is contained in the model. The theory begins by positing that economic agents are by nature rational, calculating beings, each trying to pursue his or her own self-interest, which results in an orderly economic outcome due to the “equilibrating role of relative prices,” as Fischer puts it (1987, 164). Responses to economic information, channeled through competitive markets, will result in an orderly, stable outcome. The only causes of disequilibriums in this world are constraints on the competitive market. Along with its neoclassical roots in Harrod-Domar, the World Bank model shares a more contemporary attachment to neoclassical thinking, one associated with the paradigm transformation that has occurred in economics in the latter part of the twentieth century. For almost three decades after World War II there was at least tacit support for the idea that the interventionist state played a large role in the development process. However, from the early 1980s until the late 1990s, the state-centered approach has been in retreat. The Washington consensus that replaced it argues that the only route to development is liberalization and integration into the global market. Countries are discouraged from pursuing policies that might interfere with this process. The World Bank’s model recommendations square, more or less, with the Washington consensus paradigm. Growth will occur only if controls on foreign investment, production, prices, exchange rates, and imports are removed. Export-oriented strategies are promoted aggressively by the World Bank (World Bank 1993). In this the World Bank does not differ signi‹cantly from the IMF. The IMF’s model supports a policy stance of promoting free markets. The difference is that the emphasis on growth (as opposed to the short-term demand-side concerns of the IMF) has meant that the World Bank sees its role as promoting broader structural change in less developed economies. Economies are encouraged under conditionality agreements not only to apply the rules of austerity in matters monetary and ‹nancial but also to reorient toward the export sector and toward encouraging foreign investment in the name of future growth. In this respect, the World Bank approach has embraced what Alejandro Foxley refers to as a “strange sort of structuralism,” one that believes that the structure of the developing country economy needs to be changed in order for markets to function well (1983, 17–19). Its policy recommendations, in addition to cutting government spending and using contractionary monetary policy to get things in order, often encourage countries to sell off state enterprises, real-

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locate resources toward the export sector to encourage the production of tradables at the expense of nontradables, cut government subsidies, and so forth—all in the name of “unleashing the power of the market.” Belief that the power of the market only needs to be unfettered by intervention is re›ected in arguments such as the startling claim in a 1981 World Bank report that underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa occurred because a “dynamic and highly competitive private sector has been constrained by government intervention” (World Bank 1981, 37). Like the IMF model, the World Bank model also provides a framework within which we see the developing economy as a knowable, predictable, and manageable entity. Provided the resources are available to ‹ll the gaps, growth is assumed to ›ow automatically in accordance with its theoretical foundations. The economic theorist and planner uses an algorithm to determine what level of investment, savings, imports, and external borrowing would be required to reach a target rate of national growth. Flows of capital and goods in and out of the economy are ‹t within an overarching logic similar to the calibration of ›ows to a machine. The vagaries of social and economic life, the complexity of agents, and the dynamics of social systems that might not ‹t this calibration are left out of the conversation. It should be noted that the statistical information used to make estimates in the applied model is often of questionable value. To take just one example, the World Bank model provides an estimate of what the realwage effects of adjustment will be on the labor force. However, this estimate is based on very limited data because there will not likely be reliable labor force surveys that give some sense of wages before adjustment (never mind after), and whatever data are available are typically limited to public sector wages. As a World Bank study states, “the main data limitations are certain to be in the area of the informal sector and the market-based wage” (World Bank 1993, 24). The study admits that using public sector wages as a basis to make estimates for all wages in the economy is an “imperfect indicator” that will not give very useful information on real-wage changes for most of the workers in the country. Yet these statistical estimates of real-wage changes, which by the World Bank’s own account should probably be handled with tongs, if at all, are used routinely as the basis of policy prescriptions and treated within the model as a fact of the economy. The use of other statistical measurements in the model often relies on similarly ›imsy or contested evidence. For example, the theory that growth is a function of the incremental capital/output ratio has been widely ques-

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tioned and criticized. Yet these data and relationships are presented as facts of the economy upon which policy decisions are made. This is not to say that all that needs to be done is to get some good statistics to plug into the World Bank model and then it will work correctly. Even with the best data, the kind of analysis valued by macroeconomists working in this area takes a structured approach, one that assumes the relationships between different sectors and variables do not change over time and that cannot account for nonquanti‹able aspects of the economy. These limitations are, by the way, readily admitted by the World Bank (1993, 28–29). Nonetheless, the model continues to provide the analytical underpinnings of structural adjustment policies, where model answers are presented as expert knowledge. This illusion of expertise is augmented by the way the model presents a view of the economy as a predictable and manageable site. In that the RMSM is built on Harrod-Domar foundations, this presumption that the economy can be guided with relative ease to a stable growth path is interesting from a history of thought perspective. As mentioned in chapter 2, Harrod’s initial (1939) article was skeptical about the possibility that outcomes would be predictable. Instead, his theory suggested three possible (and unpredictable) outcomes of investment planning: the possibility of steady growth at full employment, the improbability of steady growth, and the potential instability of the rate of growth. Later variations, however, reconstructed the original model into one that could be used to plan development. In these later formulations, doubts about the predictability and sustainability of national economic growth disappear. This was in part due to a reworking of the model by economists at the World Bank and United Nations (Jones 1975) and Solow, whose (1956) revision of Harrod’s model asserts that the growth path is easy to ‹nd and, once found, takes a self-sustaining equilibrium path. The reformulated model claims smooth and predictable growth and is thus of more use to an institution that claims it can “‹x” the problems of the Third World through principles of sound management. Thus, the liberalization approach of the World Bank tends to represent the economy as something that is responsive to government policy, an object that stands outside of the state, subject to the principle of governmentality. The structural adjustment of a country is seen as the outcome of a set of policies implemented by the government, while instabilities are seen as the outcome of poor government policies. The point to be under-

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scored here is not that this is just a feature of World Bank policy-making but that the principle of governmentality is included in the analytical underpinnings of policies, in the economic theories themselves. The government changes the country’s monetary policy, its exchange rate, tax, and spending structure, its subsidies, and so forth in the assumptions of the model. It does not state that the government has total control, of course, because government plans must also submit to the perceived logic of the free market. But it does suggest that what is under state control is the determinant of economic outcomes, while that which lies beyond government control is secondary. This may seem paradoxical because much of what the World Bank does is attempt to decrease the amount of government intervention in the economy. But even increasing reliance on the market is an act of government in the framework of the World Bank, as well as the IMF. And because the move away from state policy toward the market is engineered by the state, it has the perverse effect of strengthening the state, as T. Bates and A. Krueger have noted: Economic reform clearly leads to an increase in the power of the executive branch of government and, in particular, its ‹nancial units. It is important to savor the irony embedded in this ‹nding. Many who advocate economic policy reform in the Third World advocate the expanded role for markets and call for a reduction in the role of the state. In their rhetoric they pit the market against the state; expansion of the role of one implies, in their conception, a reduction in scope of the other, through privatization, cutbacks in public spending, and a reduction in regulatory powers. And yet, as suggested in the country studies . . . economic policy reforms are not anti-state; rather they appear to strengthen the powers of the core of the state, the executive branch, and to enhance its control over key economic policy variables which affect the outcome of economic activity. (1993, 462–63) There is not as much irony to be savored, however, when one considers that the key variable in World Bank and IMF structural adjustment schemes is the absence or presence of what they de‹ne to be good state policy. In the World Bank model, the government is assumed to function as an apolitical machine for implementing structural adjustment programs. The question of the political character of the state, its class, gender, and/or ethnic alliances, the function of corruption, and so forth are not part of the

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model. The state has no interests except stability and growth for the “good of the people.”4 Representations of the state as a site where the political, social, and economic con›icts of the nation get played out would call into question the neutral stance of the development agency that implements policy through the state and for this reason must be pushed to the margins of thought. To some extent the World Bank recognizes this issue. For example, its 1997 World Development Report focuses on a heretofore relatively neglected topic, the problem of the ineffective and/or corrupt state. The report contends that while an earlier generation of development theorists and practitioners believed that “technical experts would formulate good policies, which good governments would then implement for the good of society” (World Bank 1997, 1), the current crop is beginning to realize that some countries need help in developing a government that is capable of undertaking development initiatives and effectively implementing them: “For human welfare to be advanced, the state’s capability—de‹ned as the ability to undertake and promote collective actions ef‹ciently—must be increased” (3). This stated recognition by the World Bank that governments are sometimes ineffective or corrupt does not, however, contradict the point regarding technical expertise. In fact, it supports it by showing how deeply ingrained the World Bank’s belief is that governments can and should be apolitical machines for implementing policy. But it brings up another irony, one far deeper than that identi‹ed by Bates and Krueger in the preceding quote: the World Bank and IMF represent economic policy through the lens of governmentality and manageability while simultaneously representing the nation-states of the global South as not capable of systematic, coherent management of any sort. This conceptualization was in great evidence during the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s. What caused the crisis? While many analysts have suggested that the irrationality of international ‹nancial markets was the culprit, the IMF and World Bank were more likely to point to the “corruption” and weakness of the developing country state as the cause. This rhetoric underscored their attempts to further limit state-led economic management in these countries. There were calls for “transparency” in government policymaking (which in IMF and World Bank parlance usually refers to decreased management and more emphasis on the market), which de‹ned “corruption” as transparency’s other, its dark side. As Joseph Medley and Lorrayne Carroll recount, the IMF saw the “Asian Miracle” as springing from saving, prudent ‹scal policy, capital investment, and liberalization

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and saw the continued existence of government intervention in global markets as a form of corruption to be shunned (2003, 146–47). In these rhetorics, the IMF and World Bank portray their reforms as the benign and civilizing forces that can resolve the crisis: There is a strong consensus for making transparency the “golden rule” of the new international ‹nancial system. On that I can be very brief, merely to underscore that it is absolutely central to the task of civilizing globalization. (IMF 1999, cited in Medley and Carroll 2003, 147) There is also another aspect to this rhetoric worth pointing out. As Nitasha Kaul suggests, in their stories the World Bank and IMF have contributed their piece to a long history of representing the Other as incapable of its own management—management of the passions that lead to virtue, management of authority for proper policy-making, even management of the boundaries of the supposedly sovereign nation (2003, 5). This is another reason why the IMF and World Bank continually recycle the rhetoric about promoting good governance in the global South. In the next section I provide a brief look at some of the critical economic alternatives that have been offered to World Bank and IMF structural adjustment approaches. I show the various ways that they have challenged the World Bank’s and IMF’s assumptions but also point out some of the ways that the assumptions of critics leave them on the same discursive terrain as these institutions. I turn ‹rst to the neostructuralist model of structural adjustment and then to the feminist critique of World Bank and IMF approaches.

Critical Approaches: Neostructuralist and Feminist Accounts Neostructuralist Alternatives The analytical approach of structuralist macroeconomics is signi‹cantly different from the IMF’s or the World Bank’s model. It takes as a starting point the existence of disequilibriums whose causes are embedded in the underlying economic and social characteristics of the country. A focus is on the con›icts over distribution and how these affect macroeconomic outcomes. Structuralists try to include institutional content in their models,

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which is largely absent in the other frameworks. These emphases are very different from the market-clearing, equilibrium, harmony-driven perspectives and models used by the international ‹nancial institutions. This school of thought includes Lance Taylor and Edmar Bacha as prominent contributors. One source of inspiration for this approach is the structuralist analysis of the economy carried out at the United Nations Commission for Latin America (ECLA) in the 1950s and 1960s. Early structuralist ideas have been revised quite a bit in the contemporary models, with ideas added from Michal Kalecki and Keynes and macroeconomic relationships speci‹ed in model form. The contemporary approach is thus sometimes called analytical or neostructuralism (Taylor 1987). I use the term “neostructuralism” to differentiate this position from both the older structuralist views and the structuralist aspects of the World Bank approach discussed in the preceding. Much of the debate between neostructuralists and neoclassicals revolves around the speci‹cation of model closure. Neoclassically inspired models assume that prices are ›exible and markets clear instantly. No additional equilibrating variables but market prices are required. This is the closure mechanism that underlies the IMF model. The closure of the World Bank model is determined on the general level by the equilibrating mechanism of market prices as well. However, because of the savings and foreign exchange constraint, closure is achieved by assuming aggregate consumption as the residual from the national income accounts and then having the government intervene to adjust total consumption (through ‹scal policy or attracting foreign capital) to balance the economy. In both the IMF and World Bank approaches closure is assumed to happen in a smooth and predictable manner. Neostructuralists generally disagree with these assumptions and closure mechanisms. They begin by noting that the structural and institutional constraints on reaching an equilibrium growth path are greater than the neoclassically leaning IMF and World Bank models are willing to acknowledge. The constraints include structural rigidities such as the lack of savings and foreign exchange as well as the role of power and con›ict between groups such as the rich and poor and/or farmers and city dwellers. For example, market power creates a scenario where prices are not ›exible and thus will not shift to market-clearing levels quickly. In addition, con›ict over the distribution of income may affect in›ation and growth outcomes in the developing country economy in ways that make it dif‹cult to achieve the goals of price stability and growth under IMF and World Bank rules. The basic thrust of the model argues that the economies of the

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South are determined by their structural aspects (rigidities and classes), which can be contrasted with the IMF and to a lesser extent World Bank emphasis on individual decision making as the driving force of the economy. As Ruccio (1991) points out, this makes neostructuralists not only theoretical structuralists but methodological structuralists as well. Structuralists argue that IMF attempts to ‹ght in›ation might not result in smooth processes but rather exacerbate existing social con›ict between workers and ‹rms. A restrictive wage policy, for example, might lead to increased inequality between ‹rms and workers and shift the distribution of income toward ‹rm owners. A policy of nominal wage controls to ‹ght hyperin›ation, such as is often recommended in the IMF policy prescriptions, fails to take the relationship between underlying social con›ict and prices into account—the IMF’s ›exible price model assumes that if wages do not rise, then prices will not rise, keeping the real wages of workers more or less constant over the long run. The neostructuralists contend that the outcome of IMF policies aimed at curbing wage in›ation is not just a further skewing of income between the two classes but a possible rise in the price level as ‹rms increase prices to cover the higher costs of imported inputs and to capture a higher pro‹t. The neostructuralist model can be contrasted with the demand-side approach of the IMF, which sees in›ation as a monetary phenomenon but does not take the importance of structural features of the economy such as low productivity in agriculture, dependence on imported inputs, or market power and class con›ict into account. The IMF solution of devaluation and decreasing money supply growth thus cannot theorize the behavioral responses of different sectors or the result of these behaviors on economic outcomes. Structuralist analyses of a number of different country cases where IMF stabilization policy was put into effect demonstrate that the response of the different actors in the economy has frequently led to a sharp decline in output, continued in›ationary pressure, and a rise in social instability (Taylor et al. 1988), hardly a successful outcome if the goal is price, economic, and social stability. This is in part why social groupings and productive sectors are identi‹ed explicitly in structuralist models, making it possible to decompose effects and trace changes through the macroeconomy. Here these models follow Kalecki (1971), whose class analysis was modeled in terms of workers versus capitalists, agriculturalists versus nonagriculturalists, domestic versus foreign investors, and so on.5 This runs counter to the neoclassical idea that adjustment is a smooth process of resource reallocation that should not lead

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to substantial redistribution or con›ict. The reduced consumption necessary to close the savings-investment gap might, in other words, be a result of con›ict borne by certain groups in society rather than being spread out in the economy as a whole. This will not only hit some groups harder than others in terms of distributional effects (a structuralist concern) but might have implications for future growth. Thus a policymaker needs to take distribution into account for both equity and growth concerns. The closure of the neostructuralist model takes a three-gap approach. Closure must take into account three constraints in the macroeconomy— the trade gap, the savings gap, and the ‹scal gap (Bacha 1990). This adds an additional gap to the World Bank Revised Minimum Standard Model, which speci‹es savings and trade gaps as constraints to the growth and adjustment process. The ‹rst gap is in savings because developing countries have insuf‹cient savings to underwrite growth. This has been on the agenda of development economics since Rosenstein-Rodan (1948) suggested that underdeveloped economies needed to supplement their national savings with foreign capital in order to achieve increased rates of growth. The second, the foreign exchange gap, was speci‹ed by Hollis Chenery and Alan Strout (1966) to show that a shortfall of savings might not be resolved entirely by reliance on the external market because foreign exchange is needed not only to ‹ll the savings gap but to ‹nance imports. Thus, the availability of foreign capital may constrain the growth process. The third, ‹scal, gap has been theorized by structuralists like Taylor (1987) and Bacha (1990), who argue that the growth prospects of developing countries are impaired by ‹scal constraints that do not allow economies to capture the “crowding in” effects of government spending. This differs from the World Bank two-gap approach, which generally suggests cuts in ‹scal spending. Despite this and other differences in terms of policy, the neostructuralist approach shares many features with the World Bank’s RMSM. Both focus more on the supply side of the economy and take structural rigidities into account. Both rely on variants of the economywide multisector model. The World Bank draws upon structuralist thinking, particularly the insights of Chenery as discussed in the preceding. Both also assume that there can be a knowing government that can resolve the disequilibriums of the national economy. As discussed in this chapter, the World Bank model is based on the presumption that state economic policymakers will be able to determine the various parameters of the economy and from these determine how much consumption must fall (or foreign investment must

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increase) to close the gaps in the economy, with, of course, help from the experts at the World Bank. The neostructuralists also believe that the right state policy can restore the economy to a stable growth path. In theory, the neostructuralist model assumes a neutral government willing to implement pragmatic policy based on structuralist models. The neutrality of the state would include being above the fray of class struggle and other power relations. In practice, neostructuralists are not sure that existing governments are up to the task. Here they agree with the recent concerns of the World Bank about the issue of “good governance.” Of all the models discussed thus far, the neostructuralist approach is the least abstract and universalistic. It creates a space for a more pragmatic and case-speci‹c approach than the extreme universalism of the one-size-‹tsall neoclassical prescription of the IMF or the slightly less universalistic neoclassical-structuralist take of the World Bank. As Taylor puts it, “Each economy confronts a special set of structural constraints on its possible evolution, and these restrictions vary greatly from place to place and time to time. . . . country speci‹c models taking into account the salient features of the economy at hand can say something about its . . . prospects” (1983, 191). Here, we ‹nd grounds for eschewing the universalizing engineering approach of the Bretton Woods institutions that, as Mitchell (1995) puts it, compares developing countries as if they were cars or washing machines. But these grounds for imagining difference are minimized by the assumption that the essential features are by and large the same across countries (the same “gaps” and constraints and the same general class con‹gurations and points of struggle). The technical con‹dence in this approach is as high as for the other models discussed in this chapter, as is the tendency toward constructions of the economy as a manageable object and the spirit of governmentality that hovers just beneath such constructions. Neostructuralists presume that all of the various relevant factors in each economy (e.g., import and export elasticities, monetary and ‹scal policy, class struggle, and institutional constraints) can be known, captured in a model format, predicted, and controlled. The uncertainties of the developing country case in terms of the particularistic nature of each national economy are not so great as to preclude our being able to know the case and predict outcomes. In other words, while the model presents the economy as more complicated, and creates some room for difference, it assumes that these complications can be overcome through the judicious application of good science. There is no

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consideration that the complex nature of the economy might result in contradictory results of policy. In the writings of Taylor the technical capabilities of the neostructuralist model is frequently extolled by his pointing out the extent to which it conforms to the standard economic style of presentation in mathematical terms even though it is more complicated and relies less on thin simpli‹cations than standard neoclassical approaches. Taylor states that “there is a strong tendency in orthodox economics to make a fetish of technique. In part this book responds to fashion, it purports to show that structuralist thought can be made rigorous” (1983, 4). The sort of rigor that Taylor embraces includes placing economic information into a model that allows for the formulation of predictable outcomes. The down side of this move is that it contributes to an emphasis on legibility and manageability that pushes certain issues and concerns that do not ‹t into model form to the margins of analysis.6 This is not to say that values and social concerns are not on the neostructuralist agenda. The neostructuralist approach is receptive to the idea that politics and economics are interrelated and that economic solutions are political. Structuralist macromodels are able to take class con›ict and con›ict between sectors into account, thus allowing for a view of the economy as a contested site. In contrast, the differential effects of policy are completely absent in the IMF model, and the World Bank multisector approach is more interested in how different sectors contribute to general economic growth than in the differential effects of policy in terms of distribution.7 But at the same time, neostructuralist thought also embodies aspects of the discourse of expertise discussed in the preceding, particularly with regard to their conception of economic space and the pregiven structure of economic processes within it. The taken-for-granted structure of the economy posited by the neostructuralists tends to limit the scope of intervention to a small set of relatively minimal macroeconomic adjustments. In Taylor 1993, countries are presented as constrained by a preexisting logic that ties the hands of policymakers. For example, the essay on Nigeria focuses on it improving export agriculture to resolve its de‹cit and also contends that the distributional impacts of this move are beyond the scope of policy. The solution proposed in an essay on Brazil and Argentina is said to be “reasonably clear”: it involves making ‹scal cuts equivalent to 5 percent of GDP and identifying a leading export sector that can anchor future growth.

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Nicaragua, Senegal, and Zimbabwe are all characterized as small and dependent, allowing policymakers “few degrees of freedom.” All of these prescriptions are couched in terms of how little can be done given the constraints and the “realities” facing these economies, including, especially, the reality of the market. This way of framing things contributes to a discourse of structural adjustment in which the range of economic emotions runs the gamut from A to B. The policy conclusions offered in Taylor 1993 are, in the end, not dramatically different from the ones offered by neoclassical theorists working for the World Bank and IMF: export promotion, ‹scal responsibility, and foreign investment. Further, while the con›icts of values and political interests in development countries are recognized, there is little recognition of the interests and values that the neostructuralist theorist might bring to the table. The economist is assumed to be an objective, value-free observer. National economies are discussed as if they are objects separate and apart from the economist whose model is simply mirroring these objects. Values are not brought into the discussion except to deride warped neoclassical values for the way they pervert reality. The neostructuralist’s focus on empirical facts is the basis of its claim to be closer to the truth than other models. A swipe at North Atlantic neoclassical theory by Taylor conveys this: “evidence rarely carries the day in [mainstream] economics, since it is so easy to invent a theoretical twist to rationalize any inconvenient fact” (1991, 101). Neostructuralist approaches, in contrast, are touted for their close relationship to the facts of the case: “the papers [in this book] are sensible and realistic,” Taylor writes. “Most were written by nationals and the rest by expatriates with substantial ‹rsthand experience in the countries concerned” (1988, 3). The involvement of “nationals” is emphasized here because of a belief that nationals have a better grasp of the speci‹cs of their case and also represent the interests of their countries. The fact that most of them have PhDs from U.S. universities and/or their knowledge is couched in terms of Western social science categories would seem to be a salient feature in this regard, but it is not mentioned. Further, the particular perspective of the “national” expert in terms of his or her place in the social constellation of the country under study is not brought up. Rather it seems to be assumed that the expert’s nationality, meaning familiarity with the situation at hand, brings him or her closer to the truth. Taylor and U. Pieper (1996) decry the faux expertise of expatriate devel-

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opment economists and policymakers from the IMF and World Bank. They argue that these are frequently second-rate economists who spend only a short time on the ground and don’t know any better than to apply universalistic formulas to each developing country case. Many IMF country missions place policy analysts in the country they are studying for only a few weeks, and they see little except for the inside of a luxury hotel, so it is hard not to agree that Taylor and Pieper have identi‹ed a compelling example of intellectual imperialism gone awry (see also Stiglitz 2002). The emphasis on the superiority of knowledge based on time spent in the ‹eld is a hallmark of not only structuralist macroeconomics but development thought more generally. Escobar has remarked that it represents a “double burden” for development theory (1995a, 7).8 In order to truly understand this other, foreign society (or economy), development thinkers must immerse themselves into what they are studying. At the same time, however, they must maintain an objective, detached stance in which that society exists “out there” and can be studied. This is done by delineating the space between the people or economy being studied and the knowing observer who can intervene on behalf of either. At issue in such formulations, Escobar argues, is the extent to which they contribute to an idea of Western superiority as well as silence the perspectives of the persons being studied. Neostructuralist approaches, not unlike their IMF and World Bank counterparts, are based on the presupposition that people in less developed economies need to be saved (from structural constraints, the IMF, etc.). It is true that this presumption is expressed somewhat more subtly by neostructuralists than it is in the IMF and World Bank models, with their missionary fervor of liberalizing the “pathological” countries of the global South.9 Still, there is a presumption that people in developing countries are waiting for the helping hand of the international development expert. For example, Taylor (1995, 1956) asserts in a recent article that his “model’s predictions would give even the greenest imaginable ‹nance minister [in a developing economy] considerable pause.” To be fair, Taylor and his associates often argue that there are locals who can and should participate in solving macroeconomics. However, they are referring to experts trained in economic modeling who live in that country. For instance, Taylor and Pieper argue: Certainly in Latin America and Asia and increasingly in Africa, country economic teams are better quali‹ed technically than the

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lower rung PhDs from American and European universities to whom the BWIs [Bretton Woods Institutions] entrust their missions. Local economists can run through ‹nancial programming and the Bank’s standard macroeconomic model . . . as well or better than the people from Washington can; they also know how to do investment project analysis. They should be given a chance to apply their knowledge of their own economies to the fullest extent.10 (1996, 58) Here we ‹nd a plea for “local voices” instead of expatriate, cosmopolitan experts in structural adjustment. But the case rests on the notions that some locals are better trained than the “lower-rung” PhDs that currently work at the World Bank and IMF and thus have a better grasp of model answers; because the country economic teams are from these countries, they have a privileged view of the economy, one that is closer to the truth, one that supposedly will allow them to understand better the effects of structural adjustment on the poor, for instance. While it might be true that local talent goes to waste because the Bretton Woods institutions prefer to hire American and European nationals to design and implement policies and that people who are natives of a country might have a different view of things than some outsider who ›ies in for a week, the suggestion does not solve the problem of “expert discourse” and the silencing of local perspectives. Taylor and Pieper make the assumptions that only people with the technical capabilities to understand macroeconomic models should be involved in the conversation and that these local experts will be neutral, objective, and dispassionate policymakers who will have the collective wellbeing of their country at heart. This narrative of expertise is underscored by an operating assumption that the economy contains an underlying logic. Ruccio (1991) demonstrates that the discourse of structural adjustment places an emphasis on natural order. The neoclassicals take human nature—the centered rationality of economic agents—to be the essence of the economy. This rationality, channeled through competitive markets, brings about equilibrium outcomes that constitute the best of all possible worlds. Structuralists, in contrast, believe that structural and institutional constraints are the essence of the economy in terms of determining economic processes. These structural constraints may lead to less-than-optimal outcomes. In the structuralist framework, however, the state can step in and mitigate the effects of structurally determined outcomes and restore the underlying order to the economy. In both the neoclassical and structuralist framework, once the con-

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straints are removed, an orderly and stable process of development will be achieved. The implications of this on how economists think about structural adjustment are enormous. The essentialism of modern development macroeconomics in either the structuralist or neoclassical variant effectively reduces the range of policy alternatives by positing a functional underlying economic logic that must be obeyed. Policies that do not subscribe to the logic are viewed as threats to the orderly functioning of the system. And there is little room “to see” the cultural, political, and economic factors or the complex and contradictory relationship between these that might affect the economy but do not ‹t into preformed notions of how the economy functions. While this move allows economists to speak with certainty about the nature of the economy, thus contributing to a discourse of expertise, it also limits the range of interventions and concerns that can be brought to the economic policy table. Neostructuralist discourse is thus one of simultaneous “mastery and submission,” to borrow Gibson-Graham’s phrase (1996, 112). Mastery, because economic knowledge is framed in terms that maximize policymakers’ ability to manage economic outcomes; but at the same time, submission, because all interventions must submit to the overarching logic of the economy, thus substantially limiting the range of possible interventions. Addressing problems such as income distribution, environmental degradation, gender oppression, throwing of the neocolonial yoke, and so forth are, in the neostructuralist world, only to be addressed after the “fundamentals” have been taken care of. The question is, to what extent might issues of economic democracy and fairness get postponed eternally, forgotten, and replaced by the technocratic language of “tinkering” with the macroeconomic structure? An examination of Taylor’s (1995) article on issues of gender and the environment in the World Development special issue on gender and structural adjustment might help to answer that question. Analytically, the article takes gender and environmental issues to be nonmacroeconomic variables, “outside” the logic of the macroeconomic structure but possibly affecting macroeconomic outcomes.11 The macroeconomy is represented as a functional system, which he presents in a vector of variables, X. This system has its own logic but may be affected by some other variables such as gender and the environment, which are modeled through a vector of aggregates called Y. He then looks at the cross effects. Does an increase in X help or harm Y? Does a change in Y have any impact on X? In showing the

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reader the various possible effects he cites work by Diane Elson (1991) and Darity (1995), who have both claimed that an adverse change in Y due to a change in policy might have an impact on X. But here the analysis takes issue with Elson and Darity. Taylor takes them to task for not being “technical” enough and thus coming to a false conclusion about the impact of gender effects of policy on the macroeconomy: they provide no estimates of the likely retarding forces scaled in terms of policy-relevant variables such as total exports or GDP, nor do they discuss a time frame. Slowdowns affecting the growth of 10% of exports . . . would probably not be macroeconomically signi‹cant, which of course says nothing at all about the anguish of women subject to severe ‹nancial and workplace dislocation. (1995, 1956) In contrast, Taylor’s treatment, which sticks to the logical structure of the macroeconomy, comes to the conclusion that if the “anguish of women” is not macroeconomically signi‹cant, then there is probably not much that macroeconomic policymakers will want (or be able) to do about it. Alternative scenarios are discussed in which feedbacks between gender and/or the environment can have some impact on the macroeconomy. Sometimes X and Y in›uence each other favorably. In other cases, where the “environmental-gender capital” is degraded, there could be potential macroeconomic effects that would then lead to a further degradation of the environment and/or gender and then more macroeconomic instability. Here gender and the environment are seen as “constraints” on macroeconomic stability, problems that must be ‹xed if the economy is to be restored to stability and order. How this example relates to the topic at hand could be discussed in many more pages. I only discuss a couple of issues. First, the article posits that gender and the environment are not part of the object of development—the national economy (macroeconomy)—and are relatively autonomous from that object. This formulation is based on the idea that the macroeconomy has its own already existing logic to which gender and the environment do not conform. One can look at the interrelationships between gender and/or the environment (which form one “system” with its own logic) and the macroeconomy (which forms another system that has its own logic) to see the extent to which meeting the goals of feminism and environmentalism are macroeconomically feasible but more importantly to understand the ways that gender and the environment might interfere with

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macroeconomic stability. Doing this is important, Taylor notes, because if gender and the environment have not been made sense of in terms of their effects on macroeconomic outcomes, these issues will not get a hearing in circles of power: People who practice macroeconomics—heads of state, central bankers, ministers of ‹nance, large scale currency speculators—wield much more power than feminists and environmentalists. . . . Are the latter’s concerns substantive (let alone interesting) from the former’s point of view? If not, given the way that the world is presently organized, gender and ecological concerns will continue to be given short shrift by the capitalist system. (1995, 1954) What this perspective neglects, however, is that environmental and feminist concerns have become at least a stated (if not yet adequately funded) priority at the World Bank and United Nations, development practitioners right and left have celebrated women-centered development initiatives such as the Grameen Bank, environmentalists have successfully organized to stop destructive capitalist investment projects that have been proposed in the name of structural adjustment, and so forth. Why are these initiatives swept aside in Taylor’s analysis as if the feminists and environmentalists have had a smaller impact on development than neostructuralist macroeconomists have had? In part it is because of the presumption that only the Greek-letter language of macroeconomics will get a hearing, and that women need to frame their issues in these terms or be ignored. Ironically, as Taylor himself dismisses the importance of women’s ‹nancial “anguish” because it does not have a very large impact on the macroeconomy, the language of macroeconomic modeling does not seem likely to give the causes of environmentalists and feminists a more powerful voice. One reason why Taylor might have dif‹culty seeing the gains of feminists and environmentalists is because their concerns have frequently been couched in social and moral terms of fairness, human rights, the intrinsic nonquanti‹able value of the environment, and so forth. If gender and the environment are only represented as a fuzzy set of social concerns, Taylor worries, then they can’t be taken seriously. Better to try to make gender and the environment part of a technical, quanti‹able argument about macroeconomic outcomes. Then ministers of ‹nance and large-scale currency speculators will start to care about women and the environment. Taylor’s intentions here are not bad ones. The outcomes, however, are

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more questionable. For what he does in this article is suggest that moral and social concerns do not have a voice in the debate over structural adjustment. Only problems that can be speci‹ed in a form that can be predicted and manipulated by experts have a place in the conversation. He posits that economic models represent an “impeccable logic” that can be contrasted with the then-dismissed social and moral concerns of feminists and environmentalists. And in this, he is embracing a discursive framework similar to the one used by Summers in the memorandum cited at the beginning of this chapter. Feminist Macroeconomics: A Response to Structural Adjustment Feminist concern with macroeconomic questions represents a relatively recent intellectual shift. Most feminist research in the 1970s and 1980s focused on microeconomic questions of gender inequality in the labor market (e.g., Bergmann 1974) and analyses of power, con›ict, and distribution in the household (e.g., Hartmann 1981; Folbre 1988). Since the late 1980s, however, feminists have begun to pay more attention to macroeconomic issues such as structural adjustment. They have noted a “gender paradox” in which gender appears unimportant in understanding economic change in mainstream theories when in fact it is an increasingly important economic factor (Bakker 1996a). Liberalization and export-promotion efforts falling under the rubric of structural adjustment policies have increased women’s exposure to markets as laborers, sellers of goods, and consumers, and women make up the majority of workers in ‹rms that have relocated to the global South as well as a sizable proportion of immigrant labor moving north to escape poverty (Marchand and Runyan 2000). Further, women have often borne the brunt of the costs of adjustment in terms of losing access to support services from the state due to ‹scal austerity measures. In order to better understand the impact of structural adjustment on women’s lives as well as the impact of gender on structural adjustment, feminist economists have called for gender-sensitive analysis at the macroeconomic level (Standing 1989; Elson and Pearson 1989). They have suggested some of the following approaches: disaggregating the data to account for differences in consumption and savings patterns by gender (Collier 1994), taking women’s economic behavior into account to better re›ect gender inequalities (Elson 1995), counting women’s nonmarket reproductive work in GNP to include this contribution in discussions about the macroeconomy (Benería 1992), or, as in Taylor’s approach, ana-

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lyzing the nonmarket reproductive system as an autonomous “gender system” with its own logic and feedback effects with the macroeconomy (Humphries and Rubery 1984; Walters 1995). The project of engendering structural adjustment involves two distinct but related projects aimed at both tracing and changing the outcomes of such policies on women. One focuses on disaggregating the macroeconomy to take gender difference into account. The gender-neutral abstractions of the theories used by the IMF, the World Bank, and even the neostructuralists have a gender dimension to them—they only take “masculine” behavior into account. As Elson puts it: Being a worker, or a farmer, or an entrepreneur does not overtly ascribe gender; but women and men have very different experiences as workers, farmers, and entrepreneurs; the supposedly gender-neutral terms “worker,” “farmer,” or “entrepreneur” are most often taken to be a man—creating male bias in both economic analysis and economic policy. (1991, 2) Paul Collier (1994) suggests that this problem can be ‹xed by modeling the different behaviors of men and women in terms of investment, savings, and consumption and then disaggregating the macroeconomy by gender to better capture the responses of all the members of the economy (men and women) to macroeconomic change. Because the behaviors of women and men might re›ect unequal gender relations, doing this would allow for some understanding of gender inequality in the economy as well. The other major initiative in this area involves making the invisible productive input of women in the household visible. Diane Elson (1991) is at the forefront of this project. She has argued that the neglect of the reproductive sector is a major problem associated with the theories and practices of structural adjustment. Women’s reproductive labor makes a contribution to national well-being. It is also greatly affected by changes in ‹scal and monetary policy. For example, adjustment policies applied by the World Bank in the Third World assume that the supply of labor in the household is unlimited; thus households, particularly women, are expected to take up the tasks of health care, child care, education, and so forth that were once provided by the state. The gender bias of the policy framework can be diminished by including the reproductive sector in standard macroeconomic accounts (Elson 1991). A feminist model would take into account the previously excluded sphere of social reproduction in the household.

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This may or may not include revising GDP to include unpaid household labor. Some, like Benería (1992), argue in favor of counting reproductive labor in GDP, while others argue that it is not necessary to do this in order to take the reproductive sphere into account (Elson 1991). In either case, it is argued that taking reproduction seriously will make macroeconomic models more accurate, will result in better policies, and will also make policies less likely to rely on the unaccounted for household sector to absorb the costs of macroeconomic adjustment (Bakker 1994; Folbre 1994). While contributing important new insights to macroeconomic theory, the project of engendering macroeconomics remains inscribed within the disciplinary boundaries of macroeconomic discourse. The task of engendering macroeconomics has been to add women’s previously invisible behavior and production to already existing macroeconomic frameworks. This move allows economists to look at a different set of constraints and/or interactions than those recognized within traditional macroeconomic models. But it does not fundamentally challenge the basic core of preexisting models.12 Policies of the IMF and World Bank are seen as de‹cient because they have obscured and devalued women’s contribution, but this bias and de‹ciency, it is argued, can be ‹xed by clearly specifying and valuing gender relations in the economy and/or women’s contribution to the macroeconomy. Thus the current feminist project of challenging structural adjustment represents a variant of feminist empiricism (Harding 1986, 24). It is based on the belief that the male biases of macroeconomics can be corrected by taking the facts of women’s economic behavior into account and that this will improve the empirical accuracy of portrayals of the national economy and thus increase the likelihood that predictions will be closer to actual outcomes. This approach does not directly call for alternative theories. Rather it works with existing theories. By making these more sensitive to gender, feminist economists argue, we will have a truer, more complete picture of the national economy. Of course, like almost all empiricist efforts at reform undertaken by feminists attempting to ‹x the natural and social sciences, the feminist critique of structural adjustment has troubled existing theories, too. In examining the methods by which women’s activities have been “left out” of mainstream theories, many theorists have challenged the masculinist narratives of structural adjustment. For example, they have challenged the public/private dichotomy that underlies most macroeconomic thinking by arguing not only that policies aimed at the public sphere have an impact on the distribution of goods and resources in the generally ignored private

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sphere but that what happens as women in households “adjust” can also have an impact on macroeconomic outcomes. They have also challenged the picture of social harmony offered in mainstream theories and replaced it with a narrative of power relations and gender-based con›ict. However, they often stop short of where their own conclusions might take them. Feminist economists challenge the unspoken binary assumptions of public/private and masculine/feminine in macroeconomic theory. This insight could open the door to dismantling such binary thinking. Further, feminist economists contend that the “order” that mainstream accounts attempt to impose on the macroeconomy is ‹ctive. This insight could be the basis of new ways of thinking about the macroeconomy that eschew mainstream preferences for order and harmony. Yet feminist economists working on structural adjustment have, by and large, not taken these steps. Instead, they maintain certain elements of the dichotomous thinking inherent in mainstream approaches. For instance, feminists writing about structural adjustment implicitly assume that all women are carers. Given the problems associated with essentializing women’s behavior in masculinist discourses, feminists might want to avoid the assumption that women’s position is largely de‹ned with regard to nurturing. Opening up macroeconomics to the question of “difference” might instead emphasize the heterogeneity of economic perspectives, positions, behaviors, and outcomes that could be pointed out in a gender-aware perspective. Further, while feminist economists working on issues of structural adjustment have pointed out that narratives of national harmony, unity, and stability utilized in mainstream approaches are illusory, they also tend to reassert these narratives rather than offer genuine alternatives based on con›ict and difference. We can better understand these discursive moves by examining some of the texts more closely. The feminist economics literature on structural adjustment tends to identify Third World women as a vulnerable group, as victims of structural adjustment policies. Elson’s (1991, 1993) account of the way that the World Bank’s model assumes that women will become the “shock absorbers” of adjustment offers one such example. Elson’s careful analysis shows that the World Bank model assumes that women will take on reproductive labor such as medical care, child care, and so forth because it falsely assumes that there is an elastic supply of reproductive labor in the nations’ households. However, those who have applied the insights of Elson and others make the leap between the expectations of the World Bank and the actual outcomes of these policies in terms of how women will

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respond to them.13 For example, a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report states that the “crisis of social disinvestments [under structural adjustment] is ‹nanced from a ‘social fund’ provided by the superhuman efforts of poor women” (Baden 1997, 38). These characterizations presume that women do in fact become the “equilibrating factor” of macroeconomic adjustment, that they will absorb the shocks of stabilization policies by doing more work and making due with less (Elson 1993, 241; MacDonald 1993; Benería 1995). Here, they are basing their arguments on a long intellectual tradition in which it is assumed that women will be the ones to take on the caring labor of the household. Portraying women as a vulnerable group in the context of structural adjustment may have the positive effect of drawing the attention of policymakers to the issue at hand. For instance, the World Bank has recently invited in feminist economists such as Elson and Benería for policy dialogues and has attempted to create a more gender-aware framework that might avoid the negative outcomes described here. Among other things, this has resulted in the publication of the ‹rst book-length study on the subject by the World Bank, its Engendering Development (World Bank 2001). But such a move has some negative effects, too. It rei‹es already existing representations of Third World women with its portrayal of women’s response to restructuring as one of servile femininity. As Ruth Behar (1990) contends, it is important to resist the dominant images of Third World women that have been ‹xed within academic discourse—as victims, mothers, wives, and keepers of hearth and home—and replace these with images of creative, proactive subjects. While women might be understood to be creative “copers” in the narrative of the feminist economists described in the preceding, other forms of creativity and resistance are lost in such formulations. A related issue regarding these representations of women as victims of restructuring revolves around the subjectivity of the economic expert himor herself. As C. Mohanty (1991) has argued, the development industry’s representations of women in the global South as inherently oppressed implicitly assume the modern liberated Western woman as the standard against which the Third World woman is measured. This also contributes to the idea that Third World women are in need of Western expert knowledge. Contrast the portrayal of women as a vulnerable group with an alternative story that stresses women’s willingness to ‹ght social service cuts through community organizing and political action, and you can see that

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the latter story does not take on as big a role for the economist or policymaker. Whether or not it re›ects the problems of Western feminist theorizing identi‹ed by Mohanty, feminist economists’ tendency to pose their solutions within the dominant framework certainly results in a fairly economistic focus on structural adjustment that ignores many important social and political factors of restructuring on gender relations and vice versa. Like Taylor, who takes the position that development experts should be concerned about gender relations only if they have an adverse impact on macroeconomic outcomes more generally, many who take positions in the name of feminism re›ect this ef‹cacy approach. The World Bank’s Engendering Development, for example, tends to be very much focused on ef‹cacy issues: most of its concern with gender equity is related to the ways that inequities interfere with the goals of ef‹ciency, stability, and growth (Bergeron 2002). While such arguments might be persuasive to some nonfeminist economists, there is something important that is lost in this formulation. The ef‹cacy approach accepts a narrative in which gender equity is treated as a means to an end (ef‹ciency, growth, etc.) rather than as an end in itself. Thus the focus on the accepted goals of development as a way to get a hearing may push the real goal, the transformation of women’s lives, to the boundaries of the development conversation. As Elson puts it, “if we only work on the ‘inside’ [within mainstream discourses and practices] we run the risk of merely achieving small improvements in the formulation of models or collection of statistics which do not actually transform women’s lives” (1998, 155). One implicit assumption of the ef‹cacy argument is the potential horizontality of interests in the macroeconomy (i.e., where everyone in the national economy will share the same relative fortunes). Gender inequality, it is argued, will hamper the process of adjustment, and that is why we need to care about gender. However, couldn’t we easily imagine that the macroeconomic goals of growth and stability could be achieved through the continued exploitation of someone’s labor or the increased immiseration of particular groups in the economy? In other words, couldn’t we replace the narrative of harmony in mainstream models with one that sees con›ict as inherent in existing economic systems? David Ruccio (1991) has raised this issue of ef‹cacy and con›ict to demonstrate that what might be a failed structural adjustment initiative for some groups might in fact be a success for others. But with a few exceptions here and there, feminist economists

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still tend to pose the problem of gender in the very ef‹cacy terms that push such “fuzzy” social, moral, and political concerns to the margins of discourse. This is particularly troubling because feminist economics has set the tone for the broader feminist discussion of gender and global economic restructuring (Marchand 1996). Structural adjustment has coincided with a broader process of ideological restructuring over the boundaries of international and national, state and economy, and the so-called public and private, the gender dimensions of which go beyond the economic but have an important impact on the ways that women make sense of restructuring and behave (consume, work, and organize) within its context (Brodie 1994). This issue of the struggle over meaning, which has become an increasingly important component of feminist international relations theory (e.g., Marchand and Runyan 2000), remains a relatively neglected one within the feminist economics literature, even as the gendered meaning of economic citizenship and the boundaries between private and public are being rewritten within the context of structural adjustment. The redrawing of these boundaries includes a struggle between dominant discourses and feminist concerns. On the one hand, the dominant discourses do have an in›uence on the ways that individual men and women see his or her role in the economy and make sense of gender relations. For example, women who are entering the labor market in Mexico are constructing new identities that in part re›ect market ideals of individuality (Fernández-Kelly 1992). But ideologies are not foisted wholesale onto people (Burawoy 1982). There is always an ongoing struggle, a set of continuities and discontinuities between economic, political, and cultural practices and the images put forth in macroeconomic discourse. The feminist economists’ critique of structural adjustment, then, can be developed further by being attentive to how its interpretations of women’s lives replicate certain assumptions about gender and the economy found in nonfeminist economics accounts. For example, the current feminist emphasis on women’s primary af‹liation with household tasks and caring behavior inadvertently reasserts a view of women’s role in the economy displayed in mainstream texts. In doing this, feminist macroeconomists have tended to stick to the old script of women’s role in the national economy as a primarily domestic one. Women are best understood as the caregivers, doing the reproductive labor of the economy, taking on extra burdens thrust upon them in the course of macroeconomic change. In a sense, the national economy in such frameworks is imagined as a family writ large

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where men and women in the aggregate take on the ascribed masculine and feminine roles of the traditional European middle-class nuclear family. This narrative rests on essentialist scripts that need to be reexamined. For example, as Cynthia Wood (2003) points out, feminist economists’ accounts of domestic and reproductive labor often fail to conceptualize the differences between women of the North and the South. This results in a “‹rst-world” bias that projects the Northern model onto the world and ignores the different conditions of unpaid work of women of the South, thus marginalizing their experiences. Further, the narratives of domestic labor in many of the texts of feminist economics also homogenize the experiences of women of the global South, which are likely different enough to warrant a reevaluation of the theory of domestic labor (Wood 2003). It may be true that many women in many contexts will be the ones to take on the increased burdens in terms of unpaid goods and services production, education, child care, care for the sick and elderly, and so forth due to reduction in state services and other elements of restructuring. However, there should be no blanket assumption that all women in all places will respond in this way. Yet because feminist economists have chosen to highlight women’s role in the reproductive sphere and emphasize the primary attachment of women to caring labor, they tend to essentialize women as mothers, caregivers, and nurturers (Hewitson 2003). These essentialistic portrayals are challenged by research that suggests that there are multiple and/or contradictory responses to structural adjustment. Groups of women have organized to ‹ght such policy changes, as Amy Lind (2000) shows in the Ecuadoran case; they have formed various alliances with other groups that have been marginalized by policy shifts, as Nancy Fraser (1989) demonstrates, during the Thatcher regime in Britain; they do not just take on but share work with their extended families and neighbors, as Benería’s research on working-class women in Mexico City demonstrates. But these sorts of initiatives are not so easily imagined in the context of gender and development macroeconomics. Thus the adherence to dominant discourses in feminist critical approaches to structural adjustment has an impact on how strategies to counter structural adjustment are imagined and enacted. By trading in essentialist portrayals, they also sometimes unintentionally support the kinds of male biases in development that they are trying to challenge. For example, Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar (2001) tell a story of how the women of Chiapas produced “revolutionary women’s laws” that included demands to the state for fair salaries, reproductive rights, education, and protection against rape and violence.

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But when the (mostly male) Zapatista leadership crafted its list of of‹cial demands, the “women’s laws” were reduced to conditions that supported women’s roles as caregivers, such as state-funded child care and community bakeries. The consequence of this, as Harcourt and Escobar put it, is that “the strong and telling demands for their right to rest and their demand for autonomy, for freedom against violence was silenced” (3). Conclusion In this chapter I explore some of the ways that the analytical underpinnings of structural adjustment have contributed to a discourse of expertise around structural adjustment. To this end I show that development macroeconomics is generated within a structure of knowledge that values the supposedly detached stance of the development economist over local or connected knowledges; that constructs the economy as a predictable and manageable functional unit and an object of regulation (the idea of governmentality discussed earlier in the book); that relies upon concepts of underlying economic order to both describe the economy and make policy recommendations and upon narratives of national economic harmony to stabilize its claims; ‹nally, that relies upon Eurocentric and gendered portrayals of the countries of the global South as out-of-control and irrational and therefore in need of expert intervention to restore the underlying order. It is within this structure of thought that the discourse of development macroeconomics constructs a unique picture of the developing country economy as a functional object that can be managed in a noncontradictory manner. Relatedly it constructs the macroeconomic analyst as a detached observer who can predict and control this object. While these discursive attachments are most profound in the case of IMF and World Bank models of structural adjustment, we also ‹nd many of them at work in the critiques of these approaches. Neostructuralists and feminist economists contest many of the assumptions of mainstream structural adjustment models, including their lack of attention to power relationships, to structural constraints, to women’s reproductive labor, and so forth. These initiatives could result in a contestation of some of the other narratives of mainstream approaches, such as their conceptions of economic space, their colonial representations of the global South, or their construction of economic knowledge as detached, value-free knowledge. But they do not move very far in those directions. Instead, they remain at least partly inscribed in the dominant discourse, adhering to its narrative

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that the goal is to produce economic knowledge “outside” of politics and culture. And so they, too, participate in a structure of knowledge that increases the power of the economic analyst even as it diminishes the power of social movements and other alternatives, and this structure pushes those “fuzzy” social concerns and moral reasons that were dismissed in the memo by Summers to the margins of the debate. Within this structure of knowledge there are in fact a whole host of statements that are brushed aside. As described in this chapter, these include various presentations of the macroeconomy as a complex and unpredictable site and/or as something that is not subject to the control of policymakers. Also forbidden is the question of perspective in the sense that macroeconomic theorists left and right believe that their theory represents a neutral, objective “view from nowhere.” To recognize that development macroeconomics re›ects particularistic concerns and values calls into question the presentation of its knowledge as a technical exercise separate from moral and political issues. Armed with this knowledge, it becomes easier to see why certain sorts of analyses take center stage. For an analysis to meet the needs of development macroeconomics, it must make the developing country out to be a promising candidate for supposedly apolitical, technical development intervention, aimed at achieving the already determined goals of ef‹ciency, growth, and stability. The analysis that is most helpful to this project is the one that presents the economy as a suitable object of macroeconomic intervention, one that serves to legitimate the sort of programs that the institutional structure is there to execute. Other representations may occasionally arise in development macroeconomic discourse, but they will be less useful and thus less persuasive within that discursive frame. Thus if one buys into the discourse of structural adjustment, even if one’s values are the antithesis of those of World Bank and IMF economists, one will also be buying into this structure of knowledge. My reason for discussing the neostructuralist and feminist approaches in this chapter is, in fact, to demonstrate this point. While coming to the problem of developing countries with a very different set of concerns and values than the neoclassicals have, neostructuralists and feminist economists re›ect and reproduce a discourse that maximizes the potential role for development agencies and minimizes the kinds of questions, problems, activities, people, and concerns that cannot be addressed by this sort of intervention.

FIVE

Development and Globalization: Toward a Feminist (Re)Vision

The taken-for-granted status of the national economy as a relatively selfcontained object of regulation, as seen in previous chapters, was a central feature of post–World War II development economics. Through processes of discursive construction the economy was made legible within the space of the nation; an imagined community of economic agents was called forth, and notions of agency, including national sovereignty, were narrated through these imaginings; and economies were regulated through national models and practices of development. The status of this object, however, has been called into question since the late 1970s. The focus is now on the globalization of the world economy, and for many analysts, this signals the demise of the nation-state. But just as the national economy was a process of discursive construction, naturalization, and renegotiation during the twentieth century, so too is the global economy today. The development industry is a major consumer and producer of this new discursive order. As a consumer of globalization discourse, it has by and large accepted the story of an interconnected world marketplace. As a producer of this discourse, it is also actively authoring this narrative of inevitability through processes of knowledge construction (World Bank reports, IMF country studies, and academic articles in development journals) and policy. Development policy prescriptions emanating from the World Bank and IMF, for instance, presume that all countries must conform to the so-called realities of the global economy. As the World Bank states in its 2000 World Development Report, “In a World where ‹nancial markets continue to ‘go global,’ developing countries need to work toward becoming good homes for long-term foreign 140

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investment” (7). Meanwhile, the World Bank and IMF are actively creating these realities through structural adjustment programs and other policies intended to make these countries into “good homes.” A World Bank study on El Salvador calls for an enhancement of “global competitiveness” through the following aims. First, El Salvador should “promote domestic and foreign investment and incorporate the country into the global production chain by lowering the costs of operating in the country.” Second, the World Bank suggests that El Salvador “reduce the size of the State through accelerated privatization, while strengthening the public sector’s role as facilitator of private sector development” (cited in Ruccio 2003, 76).1 The World Bank and IMF pressure countries to pursue policies such as privatization, liberalization, and openness. As Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, once put it, “Globalization can be thought of as a giant wave that can either capsize or carry them forward on its crest” (cited in Medley and Carroll 2003, 148). But certainly the World Bank is contributing to this by portraying it as an unstoppable force while actively dismantling some of the forces that might resist it. Accounts of globalization as an irresistible force that results in the declining power of the nation-state are not limited to the discourse of the World Bank and IMF. Many commentators Right and Left have suggested that the integration of the world into one economic space through the internationalization of goods, capital, and money markets is more often than not inevitable and irreversible. Triumphalist accounts that celebrate the victory of the global market over all other economic forms produce such descriptions. But so, too, do globalization’s critics, who tend to emphasize the dark side of the new world order. While these accounts of globalization have been persuasive, their ›aws are also increasingly apparent. They are globalocentric in assuming the existence of a power structure in which global capital dominates its Others. They are disempowering in their insistence that this force determines all outcomes. And their tendency to articulate only technical and abstract economic processes contributes to a “narrative of eviction” that excludes the stories, forms, and practices that tend to disrupt globalization’s presumed order (Sassen 1998, 82). This chapter examines the ways that conventional representations of globalization participate in the narrative of eviction identi‹ed by Saskia Sassen, with an emphasis on how they affect the ability of feminist economists to imagine how local communities and feminist social movements can resist globalization’s effects. The focus of the analysis is on representations of globalization in the broader political economy literature that devel-

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opment economists draw upon to make their pronouncements. Contemporary thinking about globalization is not, of course, limited to its forms in political economy. Perspectives on the topic span academic, activist, cultural, literary, and other disciplinary practices and sites. Still, political economy knowledges are in›uential in this ‹eld. Marianne Marchand (1996), for instance, demonstrates that much of the debate on globalization in development, including gender and development approaches, has been framed in its relatively narrow economic terms. Thus, feminists working in all areas of development have to negotiate political economy notions of globalization. In the next section of the chapter I elaborate two major positions identi‹ed originally by Serap Kayetekin and David Ruccio (1998) regarding the power of global forces, economic subjectivity, and resistance. The ‹rst is the global imperative approach, which contends that the economic logic of capitalism has created a truly global economic, social, and cultural system that can only be countered by global resistance movements. The second is the national management approach, which is based on the idea that the logic of global capital reserves some power for the nation-state, including national resistance to the ravages of globalization. Following that, I discuss the work of feminist development economists writing about globalization. I show that while feminist economists have made important contributions toward rethinking global restructuring and the hierarchies of development, they tend to reproduce the territorial assumptions of mainstream theory, including the adoption of global imperative and/or national management scripts. I trace out some of the implications of these conceptual habits in the third section, where I also present an alternative approach drawn from emerging feminist scholarship on gender and globalization. Global and National Subjects As noted in the preceding, recent studies of globalization extend across a wide variety of perspectives and themes. Works in the social sciences, for example, fall into two broadly de‹ned categories. One focuses primarily on economic forces of transnational capital ›ows and global markets; the second emphasizes the cultural conditions of globalization. The scholars hold competing views on the nature and scope of globalization. Economists tend to see us converging into a homogenous world economic system, while most cultural analysts argue that recent transformations have spawned an increased heterogeneity of economic and cultural forms.

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Another point of difference exists between advocates of globalization and its critics. Basing their arguments on the tenets of free-market neoclassical economic theory, its champions emphasize the ef‹ciency, stability, and equity of the new world order. Critical perspectives span a broader range of theoretical positions and tend to focus on the instabilities and inequities of the new world (dis)order. Despite the proliferation of different perspectives and foci, however, conventional accounts tend to share a common discourse regarding globalization. For example, both advocates and critics see capitalism as the force and logic behind recent transformations. This is true for those who celebrate the global shift as the natural working out of market forces as well as for critics who contend that the world is being remade to meet the needs of what F. Jameson (1991) has called late modern capitalism.2 In addition, both the Left and the Right agree that the major actors on the global stage are transnational corporations, with international ‹nancial institutions (such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the IMF) and the state playing supporting roles. Work in the social sciences frequently portrays globalization as the inevitable outcome of capitalism’s drive to increase pro‹ts, which, with the development of new communication and transportation technologies, creates global production chains, monetary ›ows, and commodity markets. Such work represents economic logic as the determining force of globalization, and such logic is inexorable. In much of the political economy literature, the power of transnational capital is nearly absolute because it constructs a universal world economy and culture, squashing and replacing all local alternatives with universal markets (via neoliberal economic policies) and cultural products that transnational corporations such as Disney and McDonald’s produce and market (Brecher and Costello 1994; Gill 1995). These processes constitute a determining factor within the larger context of globalization. While generally theorized as the product of economic restructuring, globalization restructures cultures and societies and therefore the ways in which people construct their identities. The focus on identity and subjectivity, which is fairly undertheorized in political economy approaches, is a hallmark of much of the cultural and sociological literature on the topic. Some studies contend that the effects of economic globalization create a tendency toward cultural homogeneity (e.g., Castells 1998). While they generally cast such an outcome in a negative light, some writers have also imagined that this outcome contains some positive aspects, such as giving rise to a global civil society where, as Anthony Giddens puts

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it, “humankind in some respects becomes a ‘we,’ facing problems and opportunities where there are no ‘others’”(1991, 27). Alternative formulations, however, see globalization as a force that localizes, fragments, and even renationalizes identities, a process of hybridization as global forces interact with local economic and cultural forms to produce a heterogeneous array of different practices, arrangements, and subjectivities (e.g., Appardurai 1990). While many of these cultural analyses offer complex and nuanced accounts of the social aspects of globalization and contribute greatly to our understanding of subjectivity within this context, they tend to presume that globalization is “bigger than all of us” (Kayetekin and Ruccio 1998, 80). It is narrated, according to Kimberly Chang and L. H. M. Ling (2000), as the masculinized force that exercises power over its “intimate others,” the feminized non-Western, nonindustrial spheres. Like the dependency theorists who imagined a world economy dominated by Western capitalism a generation earlier (see chap. 3), this discursive move leaves little room for agency or resistance outside of the logic of global capital expansion. The power of globalized capital has, among other things, called into question the signi‹cance of the national as a site of collective identity and the state as a force that can function to serve the collective interests of those who reside within the nation. However, the extent to which this has occurred is a matter of much debate. Transnational capital has superseded many of the functions of the old national, state-led model and is rearranging many of our traditional notions of economic and political space (Agnew and Corbridge 1995). The undermining of state sovereignty has emerged as a dominant theme in the globalization literature. Jan Aart Scholte, for example, de‹nes globalization as the “rise of supraterritoriality” and “a general shift in recent decades away from a situation thoroughly dominated by national identities” (1996, 565). The decline of the Keynesian welfare state in Europe and North America, where the globalization of production and ‹nance is seen as signi‹cantly altering the state’s ability to manage the national economy, has signaled this shift. Similarly, in the developing world, the abandonment of state-led national development policies and the adoption of a neoliberal, export-oriented approach (often under the auspices of structural adjustment programs instituted by the World Bank and IMF) often mark the decline of national sovereignty. According to many analysts, the result has been the “hollowing out” of the state (e.g., Jessop 1995). National governments have abandoned their commitments to the poor and vulnerable and to maintaining national economic

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stability, and whatever actions they might take frequently place the needs of transnational capital above all others. For some, this signals that national governments have little if any role to play in the global economic system. For example, many advocates of globalization argue that the state must accept a drastically shrinking role given the new realities of global competition. These commentators celebrate the demise of the national model and the emergence of an integrated global economy. This aspect of globalization discourse plays itself out in multiple sites and contexts. International ‹nancial institutions such as the World Bank have encouraged the integration of developing countries into the global market for almost twenty years through the implementation of the structural adjustment policies discussed in chapter 4 and other measures. According to such institutions, future integration can solve nearly every economic problem (e.g., World Bank 1996a). For example, World Bank attempts to resolve the negative effects of economic restructuring and globalization on women have emphasized the need for even further integration into the global economy.3 Promoting the movement of women into transnational labor and ‹nancial markets will, according to the World Bank, allow them to experience “bene‹cial changes in the economy” that have heretofore simply been “slow in reaching women” (World Bank 1994, 68). The World Bank, which has based its policy-making and analysis almost exclusively on neoclassical, free-market economic theories, utilizes, not surprisingly, the same cosmopolitan view of economic subjectivity that underwrites most neoclassical economic arguments. In contrast to those who imagine the marginalized as potential global subjects who will enjoy the bene‹ts of the market once they are included, some critics of globalization imagine a different kind of global subject, one who stands in opposition to global capital. Here, “globalization from below,” in the form of globalized progressive movements and/or a democratic and accountable system of governance, can counter “globalization from above.” Arif Dirlik (1994) is one of many who argues that economic globalization has created the conditions for marginalized peoples to come together and form a global resistance movement against capitalism. Tariq Banuri and Juliet Schor (1992) contend that the global order of transnational production and ‹nance calls for a new international system of economic regulation. The international regulatory agencies would represent the shared interests of global economic subjects by, for instance, protecting the common interests of workers across the globe. However, as Kayetekin and Ruccio (1998) note, works by these critics of

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globalization retain a certain amount of ambiguity as regards the power of global capital. While some accounts suggest that the global reach of capital renders any notion of national policy, barring those measures that meet the functional needs of international capital, problematic, there are alternative visions that contend national governments have some power, albeit modi‹ed, to manage their economies, protect vulnerable groups, and bargain with global capital. Following Kayetekin and Ruccio (1998), we can refer to the former as the “global imperative” approach and the latter as the “national management” approach. Elaborating the major differences between these approaches is important because they frequently result in divergent strategies for response and resistance. If the critics of globalization imagine that the nation-state has ceased (or will imminently cease) to function meaningfully, that globalization has delinked the interests of governments from their “own” corporations and has compelled all governments to subordinate completely progressive agendas to the goal of international competitiveness, then the only project capable of subverting capital must be transnational in character. Perhaps, once upon a time, nation-states kept the economic interests and well-being of their citizens the central focus and moreover were capable of managing their national economies and meeting citizen demands for economic stability, environmental regulations, labor regulations, and social safety nets. However, according to the global imperative argument, transnational capital now thwarts national policies that do not subscribe to its logic. An alternative vision of the global economy maintains that national identities still count. This formulation does not necessarily turn on the old Keynesian/Fordist assumptions of national production and consumption or on national-planning models. Indeed, many of those who invoke the nation-state’s economic role within the new world order begin by acknowledging the extent to which that role has changed in the past years. Still, a wide variety of observers across the political spectrum believe that the state continues to have power to manage the affairs of the nation within the broader logic of global capitalist processes. Some imagine this role to be limited to supporting and maintaining the nation’s competitiveness. For example, Robert Reich (1991) contends that national governments can best contribute to the welfare of their peoples by pursuing a competitiveness-enhancing strategy such as educating the workforce in order to attract and keep high-paying jobs or by underwriting research and development to promote innovation within national ‹rms.

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The national management approach, however, takes other forms as well. Calls for restrictions on the movement of capital across national borders and opposition to World Trade Organization agreements in the name of protecting national ‹rms and workers also refer to national collective interests and thus to national subjectivities. This approach often portrays states not only as major players themselves but also as players collectively through regional trading blocs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mercosur, and the European Union (EU). Other writers emphasize the role that national governments can play in protecting subordinate groups from the worst aspects of globalization via regulations and safety nets. Still others insist that there is an important role for national policy and even, at some level, a selective delinking process in maintaining economic stability in an increasingly unstable globalized world economy (e.g., Taylor 1995). In recent years, even the World Bank has occasionally advocated an increased role for the state in mitigating the worst effects of globalization on the poor, on the condition that states practice the good governance guidelines set forth by the World Bank (e.g., Wolfensohn 1997).4 These perspectives, unlike the global imperative view outlined earlier, construct and deploy collective identities de‹ned by national af‹liation to make sense of the political economy of globalization. While the national management and global imperative approaches invoke different ideas about the power of global capital, economic subjectivity, and strategies for resistance, theorists do not maintain a distinct boundary regarding the use of one or another of these frameworks. The extent to which the role of the state has been reduced is still a question of debate, contributing to the ambiguity found in the political economy literature on globalization in general as well as in speci‹c texts. Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, for example, argue that a universal global capitalist economy has not yet emerged, but at the same time they are skeptical regarding the state’s ability to regulate transnational capital. They suggest a hybrid approach, with “integrated patterns of national and international public policy to cope with global market forces” (1996, 10). As Kayetekin and Ruccio (1998) argue, we need to recognize the similarities as well as the differences between these two major discursive approaches within the political economy literature. While each leads to different conclusions regarding global economic and political integration, and in regard to strategies for resistance, the approaches also rely upon the same general discourse of globalization, wherein subjectivities are inscribed within the inner logic of globalization. They see the total or partial global-

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ization of the world as determining the global or national actors on the economic stage who, in turn, either match or resist this process. These discursive practices create a limited space for imagining agency and practices of resistance within the context of global economic restructuring. Their emphasis on the power of institutions such as transnational capitalist ‹rms, international ‹nancial institutions, and states causes us to ‹xate on these entities while relegating others to the margins. The extent to which these discourses are amenable to feminist projects, and whether or not feminist approaches to the economics of globalization challenge these accounts and/or contribute to alternative conceptualizations, is the question to which I now turn. Feminist Economics and the Discourses of Globalization Despite all of their differences, the bulk of the writings on globalization cited in the preceding share one characteristic—their failure to speci‹cally acknowledge the gendered nature of global restructuring. There is a growing body of feminist research aimed at ‹lling this lacuna. This work has emphasized the complex interactions among multinational corporations, households, the nation-state, and women that are built on preexisting patriarchal, class, and colonial practices. In the early 1980s, much of the analysis of these processes focused on the expansion of transnational capital into the South and the emerging international division of labor. Companies preferred female workers, believing that they were more suited to this work (having “nimble ‹ngers”) as well as more docile and thus less likely to challenge management and organize unions (Safa 1981; Fernández-Kelly 1983). The resulting “feminization of employment” has resulted not only in an increase in the numbers of women in the paid labor force but in a change in the conditions of work, including temporary, part-time, and home-based work (Standing 1989). Feminist research has focused on both the negative and positive effects of these changes on women’s lives (Elson and Pearson 1981) as well as on the contradictory effects of these changes on patriarchal systems and hence women’s relative power (Fernández-Kelly 1983; Afshar 1998). A growing awareness of the importance of stabilization and adjustment policies in determining the pace of these transformations has shifted the focus of analysis. Structural adjustment policies, which nation-states have often (but not always) implemented as a result of IMF and World Bank conditionality agreements, have led to cuts in funding for social services

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and have realigned economies toward export production. The major features of these policies are discussed in detail in the previous chapter and include the cutting of government spending to achieve ‹scal balance, restrictive monetary policies aimed at ‹ghting in›ation, the privatization of many former state enterprises and functions, and a shift toward export production to improve trade balances. The differential effects of these policies on women have by now been well documented (Cornia, Jolly, and Stewart 1987; Bakker 1994). There are four major areas in which women have been affected by structural adjustment. First, cutbacks affect women as the primary recipients of state services such as health care, child care, education, and other social services. Because women hold many of the government jobs that provide these social services, their jobs are also affected by budget cuts. The feminization of the labor force already discussed is another effect. Export promotion has often resulted in policies encouraging multinational corporations to set up shop, which has resulted in the hiring of women as factory workers. In agricultural sectors, women have been primary contributors to agricultural export through their (often unpaid) labor in home production. Many women have also increased their time in the paid labor force to make up for men’s declining wages and the rising cost of food and other necessities (Vickers 1991). In Asia, women make up 33 percent of the formal labor force as compared with 25 percent in 1970. In Latin America, the numbers have increased from 20 percent in 1970 to 28 percent currently. Similar outcomes for women have been documented with regard to both the demise of socialism in Eastern Europe and the dismantling of the Keynesian welfare state in North America and Europe (Aslanbeigui, Pressman, and Summer‹eld 1994; Bakker 1996b). It is estimated that close to 70 percent of women around the globe now work in the informal sector—in the market, preparing goods for sale; in household production; and in domestic service as nannies and maids (Benería and Feldman 1992). Finally, as environmental damage increases due to decreased regulations and the impact of industrialization and agroexport industries, women who depend on the environment directly for their well-being are affected negatively. Feminist economists documenting these effects have made the impact of globalization on women more visible. While mainstream development scholarship failed to recognize much of women’s economic contribution, particularly women’s informal sector work and nonmarket household labor, feminists have made this work visible through both empirical research and pressure on international organizations such as the United Nations. In

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addition to challenging the way that mainstream analysis turns women into invisible workers, feminist economists have also made other strides in exposing the androcentric assumptions that underlie structural adjustment policies. For example, Elson’s incisive study of the World Bank structural adjustment model has made clear their male biases, such as the assumption that the supply of women’s nonmarket caring labor is virtually unlimited (1991). Bakker (1994) has pointed out that macroeconomic theory (and the structural adjustment policies that spring from it) is androcentric in its cultural assumption that a male worker/consumer/citizen is the norm and in the way it treats the interactions between paid and unpaid labor. These feminist accounts have challenged the dominant scripts of globalization by elaborating the gendered assumptions and effects that are generally not present in mainstream theories and highlighting the sometimes contradictory relationships among transnational capital, state policy, reproductive labor, and gender relations. Feminist research that shows how the private in the realm of reproduction in the household is important to the processes of globalization calls into question the privileging of the “public” sphere of governments, corporations, and international institutions in mainstream works on globalization. Nonetheless, many feminist accounts of globalization remain partly inscribed within mainstream discourses of economic and political space even as they are recon‹guring them. This is not necessarily surprising. As Gillian Youngs explains, the understandings of economic and political space that underlie conventional accounts have gained a powerful commonsense status that is dif‹cult to resist. In particular, the category of the state—including ideas about its role as a representative of the nation’s collective will, its internal power to direct processes, its external power as an actor in international relations, and the presumed interior order of the nation-state versus the disorder of the external world—continues to structure knowledge about the gendered processes of globalization even as they challenge such boundaries (Youngs 2000, 46–47). Feminist economists have, for instance, expanded our knowledge of social reproduction in relation to formal production, allowing for new imaginings of the processes and effects of economic development and globalization. They have also made important contributions to our understanding of hierarchies in development and their complicated intersections along gender and class lines. And the development of more interpretive accounts by many feminist critics has allowed for an analysis of some of the conceptual foundations of restructuring. However, as S. Charusheela (2003),

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Wood (2003), and Eiman Zein-Elabdin (2003) have shown, feminist research in development economics has also been constrained by disciplinarity and feminist empiricism (see also the last section of chap. 4 in this volume). Because of this, this research tends to reproduce the territorial assumptions of mainstream analysis, including the centrality of the nationstate, for all of the conceptually and emotionally seductive reasons that have been discussed in the other chapters of this book. Within the context of feminist analyses of globalization, much contemporary work appears to retain analytically conventional conceptions of economic and political space and to view the nation-state as the primary site of women’s resistance to globalization. This is troubling for a couple of reasons. First, feminist work on structural adjustment suggests that it re›ects an embedded system of gender meanings and values that are shared by a particular community of scholars and that these may be dif‹cult to contest by simply demanding a more careful application of existing methods (e.g., by adding women’s previously ignored labor to the equation). On a more practical level, the state’s role in protecting women from the negative effects of global capitalism has been increasingly called into question. Austerity measures such as currency devaluation and decreased spending on social services are inevitably introduced by national governments. In the name of national economic growth and stability, states have frequently collaborated with transnational capital’s efforts to exploit women (Szockyj and Fox 1996; Chang and Ling 2000). Government policymakers often accompany these efforts with claims that their hands are tied because globalization has decreased their ability to provide social services and protect workers from the negative effects of transnational capital. International institutions such as the United Nations and World Bank have tended to echo these formulations. For example, a 1999 United Nations report notes that “international trends have transformed the policy environment at the national level so as to diminish the capacity of the state to address social ills, including gender equity” (quoted in Çagatay, Elson, and Grown 2000, 1147). While recognizing the changing role of the state in the context of globalization, feminist economists tend to continue to theorize the nation-state as women’s primary source of resistance to the negative aspects of globalization. For example, the 1995 World Development special issue on “Gender, Adjustment and Macroeconomics” attempts to reclaim the state as the protector of women and other vulnerable citizens by emphasizing the role that national policy can play through instituting national restrictions on inter-

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national capital, social safety nets, fair pay laws, and health and safety regulations (see especially Çagatay, Elson, and Grown 1995). It should be noted that work in this area does not portray the state as being able to do anything it wants in this context. Like the World Bank, which contends that the forces of globalization are reducing the policy-making role played by national governments in developing countries (World Bank 2000, iv), various authors in the special issue warn against pursuing policies that are “overdesigned,” meaning anything that might scare international capital away (Tzannatos 1995; Walters 1995). Nonetheless, the underlying assumption here is that national economic policy, while diminished in its power, is the most effective and the best hope for women’s resistance against the negative aspects of globalization (see also Commonwealth Secretariat 1989; Collier 1994). These writings re›ect many of the features of the national management approach to globalization discussed in the preceding section. The goal is to reassert whatever control is possible over national economic space through the use of the expert knowledge of economic modeling and policy-making at the national level and to make feminist concerns a central part of that process. These writings conceive of subjects as having national interests associated with the relative success of national economic goals and policies. For example, the agency of collective national subjectivity would be the force that could impose regulations on foreign capital in an attempt to protect “our” female workers from the international division of labor. Of course, given the gender biases inherent in current economic policy institutions and processes, the deployment of this agency into the policy realm, feminists rightly insist, is incumbent upon making policy more gender aware (Elson 1991; Budlender 2000). Still, the nearly exclusive emphasis on the nation-state as the primary site of women’s resistance to global economic forces has limited the range of potential options that can be meaningfully discussed in the feminist economics literature. This strict adherence to the national management framework has recently been tempered by a perspective that notes some of the limits of the state in an era of globalization but views the state as retaining some partial sovereignty and control. As Çagatay, Elson, and Grown write, some dimensions of gender inequality can be addressed at the national level, for example, closing gaps in education and health. Other national policies that enhance growth and gender equality include strengthening women’s ownership and control over assets

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. . . and improving their access to credit, marketing structures, transport and technology. With increased globalization, however, other dimensions of inequality, such as gender gaps in wages, may be more dif‹cult to tackle at the national level. More concerted efforts must be made at the international level to develop a harmonized framework for labor market equality. (2000, 1153) In this formulation, the nation-state can still play a (reduced) role in regulating and socializing those markets that have not been completely internationalized. However, in terms of markets and processes that transcend the national, the only source of resistance is itself transnational. So, in this case, because labor markets are beyond the control of the national community and thus women’s interests at this level, it is the global community that must come to a collective decision about regulating labor markets through global governance. Both the national management approach and this more hybrid approach frame the task of managing global capital in order to mitigate its negative effects on women within a discourse that views global capitalism as an independent force that is largely out of our control—as Anne Sisson Runyan puts it, a “fait accompli” (1999, 218). Conceived within this frame, calls for state intervention to manage the national economy and provide particular kinds of support constrain our ability to imagine many alternatives outside the form of globalization preferred by transnational capital. They are also in part conceived within a state-centric discourse, one based on a dichotomous state/market framework that implicitly assumes that the nation-state remains the primary site of women’s identity and agency in terms of resistance to global capitalism. However, the construction of collective subjectivities vis-à-vis economic globalization and sources of resistance might not necessarily coincide with national boundaries. National contexts have never functioned as “sealed rooms” inhabited by insiders who share an account and interest in national institutions, values, and practices (Narayan 1997). States that have implemented gender-aware policies have typically been responding to the needs and desires of elite women, which calls into question the idea that state policy articulates a common national women’s interest (Afshar 1998; Schild 1998). Further, the state, which these national management scenarios position as the agent, is often in an ambiguous role vis-à-vis global capital, on the one hand representing itself as a defender of national interests but on the other itself being complicit with the forces of economic globalization

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(Schild 1998; Rai 1999). Finally, by positing that the nation is the only entity large enough to stand up to the global, feminist economists push to the margins alternative projects that displace the state from the center of politics. Women’s interventions often include a renegotiation of boundaries, such as those dividing the global/local and public/private. Forms of resistance span and cross multiple social levels, from community organizing, demonstrations, social movements, cross-border organizing, and survival strategies to movements at the national level, such as demonstrations to protest budget cuts, pressures on political parties, and feminist movement and nongovernmental organization (NGO) demands on the state (Marchand and Runyan 2000, 157). The privileging of national identities presents a problem for feminist politics because it either renders these other concerns, political collectivities, and forms of resistance invisible or pushes them to the margins of thought. Appeals to the nation-state presuppose a universal political and economic referent, but they are in reality based on exclusionary gendered, classed, and racialized meanings and practices. While feminists should celebrate the progress they have made in challenging the gender biases of government policies, they also need to analyze the kinds of subjectivities feminist appeals to the state for protection from global capitalism invoke. Marchand and Runyan’s analysis of an advertisement by the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) aimed at affecting U.S. trade policy shows some of the messages that these global/national narratives contain. The ad, which is a picture of a young white woman, carries the heading “In a fast track world, she gets left behind.” The script of the ad suggests that women are working for America and for their families. However, it also suggests that women have little agency in choosing their future. Instead, they are portrayed as victims of globalization who need protection from the state, which is encouraged to take on the traditional masculine role of protecting women and families. The choice of a white woman to represent U.S. workers renders invisible the diversity of groups that make up the U.S. working class (Marchand and Runyan 2000, 9–11). Images like this one and their effects tend to be insuf‹ciently theorized within national management discourses of globalization. As globalization has changed the ways that people conceive of political and economic space, a feminist discourse has emerged contending that nation-states and thus national subjectivities are no longer meaningful.

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Instead, the best resistance strategies for women are based on the new realities of global identity. For instance, Gita Sen writes, Capital ›ight is the sword of Damocles that hangs over the heads not only of those who organize workers, the marginalized poor and women, or dare to protest against environmental decay and plunder, but over governments who attempt to regulate the conditions under which capital can operate with a national economy. Clearly . . . delinking from the global economy is not a real choice: few economies are large or self-sustaining enough to attempt this without enormous suffering. (1997, 23) She goes on to argue that “it is dif‹cult if not impossible to challenge global actors if women are unwilling to act globally”and that the only effective form of resistance to global capital is global sisterhood, which means shedding our no longer meaningful national and local identities in favor of global ones. Similarly, Valentine Moghadam (1998) writes that the massive entry of women into the global economy blurs many of the lines that had separated women by class, race, nationality, and so on in the past, thus laying the groundwork for a global women’s movement. The role of capital as the de‹ning factor here is evident, especially in her clever echoing and repositioning of the famous pronouncement of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in which this global women’s movement constitutes a “specter haunting the global economy” (Moghadam 1998, 153). A great deal of the feminist literature on economic globalization produced outside of the disciplinary con‹nes of economics contains this heralding of international solidarity. The call for a globalized women’s movement (or coalition of movements) to rise up against global capitalism represents one form of this politics in the literature; another form emphasizes the transformation of the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the emergence of new institutional structures that can engage in gender-aware global regulation and governance (Meyer and Prügl 1999). While sometimes framed as negotiating women’s equity with one or more of the “scattered hegemonies” (Grewal and Kaplan 1994) associated with the global expansion of capital (e.g., Meyer and Prügl’s work), many of the writers working within this framework tend to portray globalization as a uni‹ed and unidirectional, rather than scattered, force. Thus they believe that only a uni‹ed “globalization from below” can counter it. But

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taking on this global imperative perspective gives a great deal of power to capital as a determining force. The interests and consciousness of actors are by and large read off of economic relations, which are in turn conceived to be determined by globalized capitalism. Economic globalization calls forth its other, the global women’s movement, which is the only possible source of effective resistance. Like the national management approach, this frames resistance in ways that leave out other potential collectivities and forms of organizing. There are, however, alternative ways of imagining capital and resistance coming out of feminist analysis that might create more space for recognizing these other forms of collective subjectivity, and it is to these I now turn. Alternative Notions of Feminist Subjectivity: Deconstructing Global Capital and Imagined Global and National Communities The gendered dimensions of restructuring extend far beyond the economic. Instead, the current round of restructuring entails a fundamental redrawing of the familiar boundaries between international and national, the state and economy, and the so-called public and private. This realignment, in turn, undermines both the assumptions and sites of contemporary feminist politics and invites new strategic thinking about the boundaries of the political. —Janine Brodie, “Shifting the Boundaries” [We must] deconstruct the abstractions of political economy and cultural discussion that erase concrete everyday experiences and serve the legitimization of power in one form or another. —Arif Dirlik, After the Revolution

While feminist analyses, particularly those produced by feminist development economists, have remained partly framed within conventional political economy discourses of globalization, they are also participating in the formation of alternative conceptualizations, which in turn lead to alternative subjectivities and political strategies. Given the capitalocentric nature of conventional approaches, which can (often unwittingly) provide “an alibi for exploitation” (Spivak 1996, 4), a challenge to the relative hegemony of national management and global imperative discourses within the feminist political economy begins by rethinking the nature of globalizing capital itself—by challenging the presentation of economic mechanisms of globalization as governed by a uni‹ed, intentional, and noncontradictory economic logic, as the more or less inevitable outcome of a drive to accumulate

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on a worldwide basis, or even as an outcome determined solely by powerful international institutions. This project begins by denaturalizing globalizing capitalism and seeing it as a socially constructed process. By moving away from hegemonic thinking about the market as a natural and unstoppable force, we can begin to imagine more broadly the ways that women can play a role in shaping markets and economies, a role beyond simply managing their already determined outcomes (Benería 1999). An emerging strand of feminist political economy recognizes that conventional discourses of globalization derive rhetorical staying power from their reliance on conventional patriarchal meanings. For example, in The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It) J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996) argues that representations of globalizing capitalism as a dominant, and to use Chang and Ling’s (2000) term, “masculinized” force create little space to imagine alternatives.5 Gibson-Graham calls for a re-visioning of the economy that challenges capitalocentric accounts. Of particular interest here is creating counternarratives of the economy that include noncapitalist forms and challenge totalizing portrayals of capitalism. For example, feminist economists such as M. Waring (1988) and Benería (1992) have pointed out that between one-third to one-half of all economic activity, such as housework, child care, and agricultural production, is performed outside of the market (see also the last section of chap. 4 in this volume). Despite its importance to the economy, this nonmarket production is excluded from standard statistical representations of economic activity. As Michele Pujol (1992) discovered, this exclusion dates back to Adam Smith, who argued that services and reproductive labor were unproductive. Such feminist insight brings into sharp relief the fact that conventional narratives of the economy are socially constructed and politically interested knowledges. Building upon the class analysis of Resnick and Wolff (1987), Gibson-Graham suggests a rereading of the economy that recognizes the coexistence of different class processes in the economy (including the class processes associated with nonmarket production), thus creating some discursive space for discovering, imagining, and enacting alternatives to global capitalism. Gibson-Graham argues that the symbolic representation of economic globalization as a powerful, dominant force rests on gendered binary hierarchies, creating a totalizing tale that reads like a rape script.6 Economic globalization is envisioned as dominant, uni‹ed, and intentional and counterpoised to the subordinate and/or disuni‹ed nation-states, communities, and social movements that attempt to resist its power. Gibson-Graham

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draws an analogy between this representation of globalization and the rape script, which takes men’s desire and ability to rape, and women’s victimization, as given. “Capitalist penetration” evokes an image of a rape that cannot be avoided or contested. This vision prevents us from seeing that global capital is more vulnerable and contestable than it appears (Gibson-Graham 1996). Charlotte Hooper (2000) has also noted the role of gendered binaries at work in the construction of knowledge about globalization; her analysis of globalization tales in the Economist, for example, discovered the use of the word “rape” to describe the movement of international capital to developed economies. The power of this rhetorical frame is in evidence when feminists imagine strategies of opposition against this dominant force, and these strategies become inscribed with the dominant discourses of globalization: resisting globalization through a coalition of the fragmented and various sites of resistance replicates the gendered dichotomies of the rape script. As Gibson-Graham (1996) has suggested, the theoretical move of adopting this rhetoric resonates at least in part with a feminist politics of revaluing the “feminine” to overturn patriarchy—replacing the rational, abstract, and dominating masculine order with the emotional, connected, peace-loving, and egalitarian feminine one. The problem with this kind of feminist politics is that it posits an essential feminine way of being, a universalizing theoretical move that has come under heavy ‹re from women of color, lesbians, and working-class women, among others. It also maintains the natural dominance and rationality of men and the passivity and nonrational nature of women (Weedon 1999). Similarly, the problem with a feminist politics of globalization based on a gendered hierarchy of meaning is not only that it fails to capture all the different subjectivities created by, beside, and outside of globalization but that it continues to represent globalization as a dominant and uni‹ed force, thus making resistance seem utopian and/or destined for defeat. An alternative approach, following Gibson-Graham, might deconstruct the concept of the global economy and talk about the complexity of its identity. We could show, for example, the ways that multinational corporations are contradictory and decentered organizations that may fail to achieve their goals or lose out to feminist initiatives. Instead of accepting the script of multinational ‹rms as inherently powerful, we could begin to see them as limited and potentially vulnerable. Images of an all-pervasive global reach could be countered with, for example, evidence that three of the four primary source nations of multinational investment (the United

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States, the United Kingdom, and West Germany, but not Japan) are also the major hosts of this type of investment (Gibson-Graham 1996, 127). Further, as Sassen (1998) points out, many global economic activities are not universal and mobile but rather embedded in place—structured by local constraints such as local work cultures and political practices. Recognizing that the power of multinationals is often open to contestation—constrained by language, culture, and law to locate in certain places but not in others—challenges the dominant script of globalization by diminishing the power of the perpetrator and provides a theoretical ground for engaging feminist interests with the contradictory potentials that these multinational organizations possess. An emerging literature on women’s economic organizing in the context of global restructuring provides some examples of these contestations and alternative conceptualizations of transnational capital and its Others (see especially Rowbotham and Mitter 1994; Basu 1995; Afshar and Barrientos 1999). Aili Marie Tripp’s research, for example, shows how women’s social networks emerging in the wake of Tanzania’s deindustrialization and austerity measures gave rise to formal and informal collective economic strategies that challenged and/or created alternatives to multinational capital. To supplement falling real household incomes, many women were drawn into the so-called informal sector of the economy, where they became involved in projects such as selling pastries and crafts and urban farming. The rich history of women’s associations in Tanzania created the backdrop for women to begin cooperating in some of these projects, and the diversity of practices that brought these women together included religious, social, tribal, personal, economic, and political af‹liations. The range of projects was large. Poor urban women who were involved together in a sewing project, for example, used that money to start a cooperative ›our mill, and others opened cooperative stores and manufacturing ‹rms. Among other things, Tripp’s chronicle of the emergence of these women’s networks and their contributions to women’s resistance strategies problematizes the idea that Third World women will inevitably be drawn into sweatshop conditions and depend on transnational capital for work (Tripp 1994). Kumudhini Rosa’s study of women working in the Sri Lankan, Malaysian, and Philippine free-trade zones also demonstrates how social networks contribute to women’s resistance strategies. In a case from Sri Lanka, women workers used wages from their jobs at multinational ‹rms to establish women’s centers that provided legal and medical assistance, library services, training, cooperative housing facilities, and food coopera-

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tives aimed at decreasing the cost of food for women workers as well as other members of the community. In this context, these women used multinational capital to foster the development of alternatives, including cooperative alternatives, to capitalism (Rosa 1994). Similarly, a group of women workers in the maquiladora region of Mexico used their factory wages to start a women’s center that provided legal assistance, a daycare center that provided training so that women could move out of factory work, and a waste management cooperative that held a contract with the city (Peña 1996). While these forms of resistance are aimed at altering and/or taking control of economic conditions, they have transformed women’s sense of individual and collective identity as well as renegotiated their places in the household, workplace, and community. These experiences and efforts serve to challenge the public/private boundaries of these women’s lives, including the boundary between productive and reproductive activities that is frequently presumed in discussions of powerful global capital “economic” processes and their fragmented, marginal, inconsequential “noneconomic” Others (Gibson-Graham 1996). They also challenge the boundary that is often drawn between the global and the local. In conventional accounts, globalization is presented as a totalizing force in which the speci‹cities of the local disappear. As such, the best strategy for nations, regions, communities, and so forth is to negotiate for better terms of connection to the global economy (Harcourt and Escobar 2001). These notions of the abstract, universal power of the global versus the particularistic and relatively weak power of the local are reproduced even in the writings of those who support resistance to globalization. For instance David Harvey, in his discussion of environmental struggles, has suggested that local strategies—“‹ghting an incinerator here, a toxic waste dump there, a World Bank dam project somewhere else, and commercial logging in yet another place”—do not amount to much as a challenge to environmental degradation (1999, 351). He argues that the movement needs to expand beyond “narrow solidarities and particular af‹nities shaped in particular places, and adopt a politics of abstraction capable of reaching out across space, across multiple environmental and social conditions.” But this call for a politics of abstraction assumes that the global capitalist forces that are the source of degradation are themselves abstract instead of place-bound, culturally speci‹c forces. In contrast, the politics of location I am suggesting here does not mean simply revalorizing the local but rather calling into question dualistic representations such as Harvey’s, which view capitalism as a universal and

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abstract force. The cases I use to shore up my argument demonstrate that boundaries are indistinct because the local penetrates the global and vice versa. These narratives of women’s economic organizing question the very idea that the global economy conforms to a single logic by demonstrating a proliferation of different economic forms. This is not to suggest that all of these alternative forms will be necessarily subversive to the goals of international capital. But, as the participants in the “Women Reclaim the Market” roundtable at the World Summit for Social Development have suggested, acknowledging that there is not “one market” but many markets, including some in which women are the major actors and bene‹ciaries and some that are distinctly noncapitalist, opens up spaces for resistance by challenging the disempowering framework of globalocentric discourse (Runyan 1999). One danger is that these contextual and particular movements will get reinscribed into the discourse of “global feminism,” for instance via representations of the NGO forum at Beijing that lump them into one uni‹ed voice against a supposedly uni‹ed capitalist world market. As Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (1994) have argued, we need to be wary of such images of transnational feminism within which varying local interpretations are collapsed into a homogenous identity of “women’s interests” against global capitalism. These interests are often dictated by Western feminist concerns, which celebrate modernity and fail to recognize the diversity of women’s experiences, including women’s experiences with economic globalization. Certain essentialist notions of a global community could distract feminists from recognizing the continuing inequalities of power within that community, for instance between Western and nonWestern feminisms.7 For example, Gayatri Spivak (1996) has criticized the United Nations–sponsored World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 as representing a kind of “global theater” that puts on a show of global unity while in fact engaging in colonialist strategies and power relations. According to Spivak, the conference represented the (‹ctive) unity of North and South but left out the poorest women from the South, and the very premise of the conference was based on Northern discursive mechanisms, including the unspoken assumption of the United Nations that the South is not capable of governing itself. However, making clear the multiple and contested nature of capitalisms and markets can help move feminist analysts away from this problematic and universalizing frame to recognize opportunities for a “strategic sisterhood” that takes into account the different articulations of economic

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processes and areas of common concern and intervention in the transnational arena (Agarwal 1996). This notion of strategic sisterhood recognizes a whole range of different possible feminist identities, alliances, and forms of resistance to globalization.8 Women engaged in a community organizing against the construction of a World Bank–funded nuclear power plant in the Philippines might join with other women’s groups in an international march of protest against the World Bank (Araullo 2000). As Stephanie Barrientos and Diane Perrons (1999) suggest, changing patterns of production and consumption of produce due to increased international integration, and their attendant effects on both Chilean and British working-class women, have resulted in local struggles. But these changes have also drawn attention to the commonality of experience for women in both countries, thus contributing to transnational organizing strategies. The formation of a coalition of Canadian and Mexican feminist groups to oppose NAFTA provides another example of “feminist internationality” that is based on partial and multiple identities (Gabriel and MacDonald 1994). These and countless other examples of women’s transnational resistance to different forms of multinational capital represent a process of reinventing and reimagining overlapping feminist communities at the local, global, and national levels. Amy Lind’s (1997, 2000) study of women’s organizations in Ecuador demonstrates quite clearly the construction and deployment of multiple identities (against multiple contested sites) in women’s response to economic globalization. As political leaders, these women challenge traditional gender relations in Ecuador. But, in their critique of the state, they position themselves as clients of the state as paternal provider and so invoke traditional gender roles. The state targets them to provide service to their communities in the face of budget cuts, which gives them power, but at the same time they are expected to do this on a largely volunteer basis, adding a third shift to their daily responsibilities. They locate their struggle on nationalist terrain, but by recognizing the state’s complicity with the forces of globalizing capital as well as its “victim” status in the neocolonial order, they challenge both national and international interests. Their relationship to the state is not based on a universal notion of economic and political citizenship but on a particular context of histories and meanings through which they have come to identify themselves with the Ecuadorian nationstate. While the nation is the symbolic terrain upon which they map their strategies, they are also remaking the nation by opposition to exclusionary state policies. Through these contradictory and overlapping sites and prac-

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tices, Ecuadorian women’s organizations are rearticulating the economic and political effects of restructuring on their lives and inventing new identities. At the same time, their political strategies are limited by the ways they imagine their relationships to capital, the nation-state, the IMF, and NGOs (Lind 2000). In this sense, women’s resistance strategies to economic globalization are not well conceptualized in the debate of nation-state versus global capitalism that characterizes conventional political economy discourses. The goal is to imagine how women’s struggles can confront the connected yet “scattered hegemonies” of global economic institutions, nation-states, patriarchal households, and other structures that support exploitation in ways that challenge these sites and the connections among them (Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 17). This is not to say that global and national subjectivities invoked in dominant political economy accounts have not served as the basis for particular and sometimes valuable kinds of activism. Rather, an alternative feminist discourse of global capitalism, through which contradictory and heterogeneous subjectivities are recognized and produced not only in the processes of global capitalism but also in the gaps and margins of these processes, offers a more transformative feminist vision that expands possible forms of intervention and resistance beyond those offered in conventional nationcentered, globalocentric, and economistic discourses.

Notes

CHAPTER ONE

1. While other disciplinary ‹elds have questioned their conceptions of space during the past twenty years, Edward Soja’s (1989) and David Harvey’s (1989) argument that the spatial dimensions of social life have been presumed and undertheorized still holds true in economics. 2. The phrase “imagined community” is Benedict Anderson’s. His in›uential Imagined Communities (1991) is a classic interpretation of nationalism. 3. In the ‹ve years after the war, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon all became independent. 4. For an introduction to the idea that underdevelopment was not discovered but produced, see Sachs 1992 and Escobar 1995a. 5. As seen later in this book, the relationship between representing the nation as a uni‹ed object and free market principles is not necessarily an antagonistic one. 6. Foucault’s analysis of governmentality and economy supports this reading. He argues that in the early nineteenth century the economy was no longer conceptualized at the level of the family but began to be understood on the level of “population” as a distinctive domain of intervention and reform. The early political economists not only provided a new representation of the economy, they established a new relation between state, economy, and this new domain of population (Foucault 1991, 103). 7. For instance, P. Mirowski (1984) describes the role played by physics metaphors in economic theory and their effect on economic knowledge production. The reliance on physics metaphors in modern neoclassical equilibrium theory limits the inquiry into economic behavior in ways that only allow for a very narrow view of human life. It also creates an intellectual climate in which theories that do not conform to the framework of constrained optimization, equilibrium outcomes, and so forth are dismissed as “unscienti‹c.” 8. Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century mercantilism, for instance, was the product of an older political order based on the absolute power of the monarch, in which power the preservation and strengthening of the state, usually taking the forms of enhancing the ruler’s wealth and power against his military and commercial rivals, were the central goals (Foucault 1991). 9. Today there has been a resurgence of this cosmopolitan tendency to see markets as extending beyond nations and thus to see the nation as a noneconomic entity. A 165

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roundtable discussion on the nation-state involving such leading neoclassical economic lights as Kenneth Arrow, Michael Intrilligator, and Gordon Tullock among others was characterized by agreement between all participants that only the most wrongheaded of economic theorists would treat the nation as an economic unit (Arrow et al. 1993). This position, the participants admit, is not a new one. Arrow points out that the nineteenth-century laissez-faire ideal of unbounded and unfettered markets would, for example, make a theory of international trade between “nations” redundant—because we already have a theory of markets and trade between individuals within and between nations (Arrow et al. 1993, 4). While conceding that economic theory and practice may have taken a few wrong turns down the road of national economic development and policy in the twentieth century, all of the participants assert that the idea of the nation as an economic unit has been, and remains, “an arti‹cial concept” that is of no use to economists (Arrow et al. 1993, 14). 10. Another piece of evidence that supports the claim that the modern concept of the national economy is a recent invention is that prior to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was no real theory of business cycles. Nineteenth-century economists (with a few exceptions, e.g., Karl Marx) did not recognize the idea of regular, predictable patterns in economic activity. Instead, they framed things in terms of “crisis” and did not have an agreed-upon theory for the causes of or solutions to these crises. It was only later, in the early twentieth century, that economists attempted to develop a theory of business cycles from early collections of national data. The invention of the new science of macroeconomics to tame these cycles resonated with an emerging technocratic vision of the economy while simultaneously connecting government intervention with the public interest by de‹ning a set of common economic goals (increasing GNP, full employment, and so forth) for the collectivity of economic citizens (Adelstein 1991). 11. In part, this transformation in the colonial experience (from one of mercantilist plunder to a different kind of power relation) was an attempt at minimizing the likelihood of revolt. As one reformer wrote in the 1830s, “The only means at our disposal for preventing revolt . . . is to set the natives on a process of European improvement” (Charles Trevelyan, cited in Scott 1994, 215). 12. Political stability was not only a concern to those in the newly installed governments, it also dominated thinking within the U.S. government, where there was a push to fashion the world in a way that would minimize political upheaval, particularly as this might tip the balance in the Cold War. Nationalist developmental ideology, as it legitimized the new (noncommunist) postcolonial states in Asia and Africa, thus received the support of development thinkers (many of whom were entangled in the intellectual and political machinery of the Cold War) on these grounds (Flemming 1961; Walker 1993). 13. There were some who took a different perspective. During the 1950s some of the leading African anticolonialists challenged the national model, calling for a PanAfrican federation that would transcend the arbitrary national borders drawn across Africa by the colonizers. But the Pan-African movement did not hold sway. The boundaries of postcolonial states were drawn by the colonial powers, who held fast to the idea that the nation-state was the only acceptable political-economic unit (Cooper and Stoler 1997).

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14. As Ann Stoler’s work demonstrates, this aspect of governmentality in the global South was unfortunately neglected within Foucault’s Eurocentric framework (Stoler 1996). 15. The idea that the modern discourse of the nation might have developed ‹rst in a colonial context challenges a large body of scholarship that claims that such imaginings were ‹rst applied to modern Europe and then exported elsewhere. This point is made in a different context by Benedict Anderson, who argues that the modern nation emerged in the way that the empires, especially the Spanish empire, dealt with their colonies. The colonies were carved into manageable units, objects constructed in a way that was meant to facilitate ‹rm control over them and to account for economic activity within each unit (Anderson 1991, 50). 16. An analysis of how development theory constructed these activities at the margin of national development is offered in the next chapter. 17. Like many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European thinkers, List believed that the countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were not capable of economic development due to their lack of “civilization.” For instance, he felt that the emerging nations in Latin America should adopt a free-trade strategy with the nations of Europe not because this would help them economically (he believed it would not) but rather as a means of rising out of barbarism, civilizing their populations through contact with the advanced part of the world (List 1837, 110). Only after adopting the civilized ways of the Europeans could these nations even think to modernize through a protectionist strategy. 18. This quote from I. Wallerstein sums up the position: “The tension between a basically protectionist and free trade stance became one of the major themes of policymaking in the various states of the world-system since the nineteenth century. . . . It was clear by then that a central ideological theme of the capitalist world economy was that every state could, and indeed eventually probably would, reach a high level of national income and that conscious, rational action would make it so. This ‹t very well with the underlying Enlightenment theme of inevitable progress and the teleological view of history that it incarnated” (1992, 517). CHAPTER TWO

1. This report had a signi‹cant in›uence on development practice in the 1950s. Resolution 294 of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations takes up this emphasis on planning in response to the report, for point 11 recommends that underdeveloped countries give more attention to the formulation of integrated programs and plans for development and planning. One of the only major recommendations made by the authors that was not taken up by the development establishment had to do with the role of aid. Noting the lack of domestic funds for investment, the authors argue that in order for rapid development to occur, the developed countries needed to provide through intercountry investment, monetary aid, or aid-in-kind roughly 3 percent of their gross national product (GNP) annually (United Nations 1951, 79). This suggestion was not passed by the United Nations and, given that the United States has never provided more than 1 percent of annual GNP, did not seem to sway governments in the North either.

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2. Wolfgang Sachs (1990) argues that the birth of development economics as we have come to know it was the result of the project by Kuznets and others to develop a set of GNP statistics for the underdeveloped economies. 3. While M. Rahnema does not note this, the ‹rst published study of comparative GNP statistics appeared a number of years earlier, in 1940. See Clark 1940. 4. To say that this was a new way of thinking about the world is not meant to suggest that earlier representations of the colonies and nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were not centered on their perceived lack of something in relation to the nations of the West. However, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economic discourse, civilization, not economic development, was seen as the marker of progress. This was the re›ection of a broader conceptual framework, associated with the colonial legacy, that could not envision for the countries of the South the kind of economic growth that Europeans anticipated for themselves, conditioned by the belief that there was little potential for economic development in these countries because the natives had little capacity for learning modern technologies and adopting Western, “civilized” ways (Adas 1989). The European colonizers were concerned about the economic development of colonial territories, but only in the sense of creating the conditions for pro‹t making to bene‹t particular individuals in the home country. They never imagined these territories could (or should) catch up to the West. In so much as they sought to improve the “savage nations,” it was not as bearers of advanced technology and economic progress but rather as the bearers of salvation and civilization through religious and cultural inculcation. To the extent that there was concern with the economic well-being of the people living in these regions, it took on a welfare approach in the sense of supplying basic nutrition and education to persons generally regarded as hapless and backward. 5. The question of why the world was divided into “haves” and “have nots” in the ‹rst place was an unimportant question for some, such as Albert Hirschman (1995), and a vastly important issue for people who approached development from a Marxist or dependency framework. But the different views on the question of “why” are in some sense less important than the fact that development thinkers of all stripes believed that the goal of development was for poor nations to catch up to and eventually emulate the advanced ones. 6. The idea that economic growth is equal to development has not gone unquestioned. Even in the early days of development, which was the heyday of growth theory, alternative de‹nitions of development were frequently brought to the table. For example, the United Nations Economic and Social Council opened its very ‹rst meeting by arguing in favor of a program of development that included not only the economic but the “social, scienti‹c, health, educational and cultural aspects of community life” (cited in Arndt 1987, 72). Gunnar Myrdal, as discussed in the following, argues that the goal of development was not growth but the making of “modern men.” Still, until the 1970s, these concerns with the noneconomic indicators of development were simply sidelines to the central theme of development as growth. 7. The need for a big push was due to the belief that less-developed countries were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that they needed to break out of. As Hans Singer puts it, “An underdeveloped country is poor because it is poor. One thing leads to

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another but nothing leads to nothing.” Singer argues that the vicious circle of poverty can become a “virtuous” circle and that “economic development is a cumulative process” (Singer 1951, cited in Arndt 1987). 8. This was in part facilitated by economists at the World Bank and United Nations (see Jones 1975; Mehmet 1995), but the excision of some of these “unruly” elements in Harrod’s work was accomplished by R. Solow, whose famous (1956) revision of Harrod’s model asserts that the growth path is easy to ‹nd and, once found, takes a self-sustaining equilibrium path. 9. Has trade moved away from such a rei‹ed approach to understanding the national economy? Some theorists, such as Paul Krugman (1991), have tried to develop a “new” trade theory that emphasizes subnational trade regions specializing in export industries within a country, thus sidestepping the national ‹rm assumption. But even as Krugman aims to rede‹ne the economic space of trade, the justi‹cation for promoting subnational regional export blocs is that they will lead to national ef‹ciency and national prosperity (i.e., that everyone in the nation will bene‹t from free-trade zones). 10. Sometimes, as James Ferguson’s analysis of development discourse on Lesotho suggests, theorists treat an entity as a self-contained national economy but also note that this entity functions imperfectly because of its dependence on another country (in the case of Lesotho, with South Africa) (1990, 63–66). Underwriting this story of a nation functioning “imperfectly,” however, is the idea that it can be made to function well, that it can break out of this dependence with the right state-led development schemes. This point is further elaborated in chapter 3. 11. This manner of enframing individual economic behavior has been the primary target of recent postmodern critiques of economic knowledge production. The critiques have taken various forms. Some of the more well-known examples include the following: D. McCloskey (1985) criticizes the rhetorical devices used to convince readers of the detached, rational, and distant stance of the economic scientist in the production of knowledge about individual behavior; Amariglio (1988) builds on the insights of Foucault to show the relationship between power and knowledge in the construction of predictable, quanti‹able individual behavior in economic theories; Esther-Mirjam Sent (1997) provides a close reading of the work of macroeconomist Thomas Sargent to show the tensions in marking the distance between the rational economic agent and the rational economic theorist describing him or her; and the essays in Ferber and Nelson 1993 discuss the masculinist biases inherent in modern economic knowledge production and its attachment to the image of the distant, separate economic scientist and the objecti‹cation of human behavior through rational choice theory. 12. Mitchell (1988) argues that this way of seeing has its roots in nineteenth-century European cultural discourse. He contends that there emerged a particular way of thinking in which the European subject experienced the world in a manner analogous to looking at a picture in an exhibition. His emphasis is on how this led to a way of seeing the Third World, turning places such as Cairo and Egypt into objects being viewed in their totality from outside. 13. For a detailed introduction to institutionalist economics, see Hodgson 1988. 14. In Asian Drama Myrdal celebrates the fact that the elites of Southeast Asia—in his parlance, the “politically alert, articulate and active part of the population” (1968,

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57)—were embracing the ideals of modernization with an almost religious fervor in the 1950s and 1960s. 15. The social construction of gender via masculine/feminine dualities should not be confused with an accurate rendering of women’s experience. Some cultural feminists have argued for revaluing feminine characteristics such as connectedness with nature and others as if these were consistent with women’s ways of knowing and being. But this is troubling on a number of grounds. First, it retains the oppositional categories of feminine and masculine that underwrite patriarchal narratives. Second, it generates an essentialist account of what it means to be a woman that leaves out or distorts many women’s experiences. 16. However, if postcolonial nationalism married Western, Enlightenment ideals of the nation as a space of progress and freedom from colonial exploitation with the goal of preserving and strengthening traditional national culture as Chatterjee (1993a) and others argue, the approach to development offered by modernization growth theorists can be seen as having sparked nationalist reactions to economic and social policies aimed at decimating traditional ways of life, the reverberations of which are being felt to this day. 17. An article by S. Charusheela (2003) extends this critique to a discussion of household bargaining models and development. Using a postcolonial feminist approach, she demonstrates how these models rely on gendered and Eurocentric assumptions that women’s insertion into capitalist markets will empower them at home. 18. A sustained critique of how the dominant discourse of growth-oriented development has ignored or silenced the concerns of the so-called traditional sector per se has only recently emerged in development thought (e.g., Appfel-Marglin and Marglin 1990; Escobar 1995a) and has led to the production of counterdiscourses such as postdevelopment studies. 19. As seen in more detail in chapter 4, it also assumes that the collective of citizens in a nation that needs restructuring is responsible for the often painful adjustments deemed necessary to restore stability to a national economy. Studies by Giovanni Andrea Cornia, Richard Jolly, and Frances Stewart (1987) show that those who have suffered the most from structural adjustment policies are generally not the same individuals who bene‹tted from the foreign loans and overvalued currency that led to those policies, but the IMF and World Bank did not take into account or try to moderate the differential effects of structural adjustment until their prescriptions were criticized over and over, for many years, on this score. Even as its own data record increasing inequality within less developed economies back to the early 1980s, the World Bank criticized its overzealous attachment to growing national income as the central policy target in structural adjustment models much later. Only recently has it promised to take the issue of distribution and social concerns more seriously (World Bank 1996b). CHAPTER THREE

1. The term “developmentalism” as used here refers to the conventions and practices that construct the global South as a less developed Other of the West and an object that is subject to expert intervention that aims to make it like the West (Escobar 1995a, 11).

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2. For example, contrast the modernization and growth approaches, which are based on the idea that developing countries are different from the advanced North Atlantic economies, with the “monoeconomics” view that all countries share the same “fundamentals,” which took hold of the development imagination in the 1980s. See Hirschman (1981) for a discussion of monoeconomics compared with theories based on structural difference. 3. For an account of the racialized nature of these processes, see Mignolo 1995. 4. Baran’s book was translated into Spanish in 1959 and discussed by a number of early dependency thinkers. 5. An example of how the state fails to achieve the development that is seemingly in its potential grasp is found in Cardoso and Faletto’s description of industrialization in Brazil in the mid–twentieth century, where “it was imperative that development be made a national undertaking—that is, one in the interest of all the people—and that the state be charged with leading the nation to prosperity” (1979, 149). This statement de‹nes the process of development as occurring at the level of the nation, where the effective state can, should it choose, pursue a policy that bene‹ts everyone within its boundaries. 6. In later years, Frank (1998) broke with this perspective and took the position that global capital could not be challenged at the level of the local but rather had to be challenged by a global anticapitalist movement. While this moves him away from a nation-centric developmentalist discourse, it nonetheless maintains the same totalizing narrative of capitalism that animated his earlier work. 7. These points were touched upon in chapter 2 and are further elaborated in chapter 4. CHAPTER FOUR

1. The national balance identity equations demonstrate that the amount of consumption and investment in a country must come from either domestic production or the external sector. The external balance identity links changes in international reserves with the current account and changes in foreign assets. The monetary balance identity suggests that if domestic credit expands faster than domestic money supply, then external reserves will fall—in other words, a loose credit policy will be responsible for a fall in international reserves and a deteriorating balance of payments. Finally, the last identity is that of ‹scal balance. Here, ‹scal de‹cit is seen as being ‹nanced by loans from the private sector, increased foreign indebtedness, and an increase in domestic credit issued by banks, which suggests that the government budget is constrained by the availability of foreign loans, the availability of credit from the monetary system, and loans from the private sector. 2. The charge that the IMF produces a sort of knowledge that is second-rate when compared with academic theories is interesting, but it tells us more than anything else that there is a fantasy that academic research is “purer” and therefore closer to the truth when compared with the knowledge generated by a leading international development organization. First, academic macroeconomic theory, even when presented in the most abstract mathematical terms, re›ects the conventions and values of its discursive community. Second, the extent to which the IMF (and World Bank) take academic macro-

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economic theoretical innovations into account is much greater than the basic models suggest. Relatively recent developments in consumer and saving theory as related to macroeconomics (such as overlapping generations models), New Classical representative agent models, and the “new growth” theories of P. Romer (1986) have all made their way into IMF analysis. The interplay between academic macroeconomic theory production and IMF/World Bank theorizing is covered in exhaustive detail in Agénor and Montiel 1996. 3. This is not to suggest that the IMF approach is a closed-economy approach. The IMF recognizes that ›ows of foreign capital into the domestic economy have broken the traditional domestic savings-investment linkage of the closed-economy model. Rather, what I am suggesting here is the idea that a “good” government policy (in the IMF’s sense of the word) can adjust to changes in international interest rates and the like to yield market-clearing outcomes, while “incorrect” policies will cause or exacerbate disequilibriums. The unspoken assumption behind this idea is that markets will adjust quickly and painlessly to changes in international interest rates unless the government interferes. 4. This representation of the state as a neutral agent of the people is often underscored by a relatively undifferentiated view of the outcomes of policy in these models. This is particularly true of the IMF approach, which does not disaggregate the economy into different sectors. But it is also an aspect of the World Bank approach in the sense that it assumes everyone in the economy will bene‹t from so-called rational monetary and ‹scal policy and/or that everyone bene‹ts from increases in GDP. 5. See Taylor 1983 for a discussion of the Kaleckian roots of structuralist macroeconomics. 6. Those who have read thus far may quibble that such complaints suggest that the only good model is one that takes in everything. This notion, if taken seriously, would rule out the possibility of constructing any model of the economy. This is not my point. All economic knowledges are models; they are by de‹nition partial and must leave out certain aspects. Otherwise the analysis would expand, like the map in Borges’s novel, until it was the size of the entire social system. My goal is not to suggest that models take everything into account but to show the implications of how the models are framed in terms of what they push to the margins of discourse. 7. In fact the World Bank’s inattentiveness to questions of distribution in its structural adjustment models and policies has come under attack (Cornia, Jolly, and Stewart 1987). The World Bank’s response (in terms of model answers) has been to add missing behavioral speci‹cations to allow for the modeling of distributional effects (see Easterly 1989; World Bank 1993; Khan, Montiel, and Haque 1990). 8. Clifford Geertz (1988) also discusses this double burden, highlighting the tensions involved in negotiations between “being here” among scholars and “being there” among the subjects of study. Sent (1997) shows that this double burden is not con‹ned to the study of so-called developing economies but is also a salient feature of macroeconomic theories aimed at understanding North Atlantic economies. 9. As Joseph Stiglitz once put it, “A study of the less developed economy is to economics what the study of pathology is to medicine: by understanding what happens when things do not work well, we gain insight into how they work when they do func-

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tion as designed. The difference is that in economics pathology is the rule: less than a quarter of mankind lives in the developed countries”(1989, 20). 10. Stiglitz has made a similar argument: “It’s not fair to say that IMF economists don’t care about the citizens of developing nations. But the older men who staff the fund—and they are overwhelmingly older men—act as if they are shouldering Rudyard Kipling’s white man’s burden. IMF experts believe they are brighter, more educated, and less politically motivated than the economists in the countries they visit. In fact, the economic leaders from those countries are pretty good—in many cases brighter or better-educated than the IMF staff, which frequently consists of third-rank students from ‹rst-rate universities. (Trust me: I’ve taught at Oxford University, MIT, Stanford University, Yale University, and Princeton University, and the IMF almost never succeeded in recruiting any of the best students).” 11. Gender is never de‹ned in the paper, but there are hints that Taylor’s use of the term refers to the reproductive economy as women’s work. 12. This aspect of the project of engendering macroeconomics is both recognized and celebrated in the literature. For example, C. Grown (1995, 1829) argues it is possible to engender most macroeconomic models, whether neoclassical, Keynesian, or structuralist. She goes on to state that some models might be more conducive to engendering than others (structuralist, institutionalist, and new-growth theories seem particularly open to gender analysis, she argues). The question of the limits of engendering already existing macroeconomic models does not, however, come up. 13. Elson is a very complicated theorist who attempts to work both inside and outside of development and often positions her arguments strategically. Thus, while we might ‹nd her taking positions that are more empiricist and based on ef‹cacy arguments in contexts and writings that she feels might get her a hearing in the hall of the World Bank, at other times she will espouse something closer to the more transformative approach suggested in this section of the chapter. For instance, she has criticized recent World Bank attempts to integrate gender for sticking to the so-called fundamentals in terms of ef‹cacy and argued that attention to social equality needs to move beyond ef‹cacy arguments (Elson and Çagatay 2000). CHAPTER FIVE

1. The structural adjustment policies discussed in chapter 4 of this volume both re›ected and enacted this rethinking with their conditionality agreements, which imposed a free-market, neoliberal agenda on developing countries. 2. While there is some debate as to whether or not recent shifts actually signify a historical break with the past (e.g., MacEwan and Tabb 1989), most accounts of globalization view the recent integration of production, consumption, ‹nance, and the media as a distinctly new phase of capitalist development. Peter Dicken, for example, distinguishes globalization from the earlier post–World War II internationalization of economic activity by characterizing it as “a more advanced and complex form . . . which implies a degree of functional integration between internationally dispersed economic activities” (1992, 1). 3. It should be noted that until very recently the World Bank has scarcely acknowl-

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Index

Adelstein, R., 10, 12, 14, 166n Agénor, P., 103, 104, 106, 172n Amariglio, J., 32, 37, 97, 100, 169n Anderson, B., 12, 19, 165n, 167n Anthias, F., 19 Arndt, A. W., 4, 5, 14, 25, 63, 163n autonomous national development: and decolonization, 3, 24–26; and dependency theory, 68, 73, 75, 77, 78, 81–88; and modernization theory, 46, 57 Bacha, E. 112 Bacon, F., 40 Bakker, I., x, 130, 132, 145, 150 Baran, P., 70, 79, 171n basic needs, 61–65, 91 Bates, T., 116–17 Becker, G., 107 Benería, L., 59, 60, 130, 132, 134, 137, 149, 157 Bhabha, H., 12, 37, 56, 57, 73–74, 85–86 “big push” theory, 42, 168n Bordo, S., 101 Boserup, E., 22, 59 Brenner, R., 87 Brodie, J., 156 Buck-Morss, S., 7, 8 Çagatay, N., 151–52 capital investment, as key to development, 38–40, 42, 45, 46, 52 capitalism: alternatives to, 80–81, 85;

opposition and resistance to, 84, 134, 142, 144, 145, 147, 153, 162, 171n; as represented in dependency theory, 68–73, 78–82; “inherent laws” of, 6, 58, 69, 71, 82–83, 89, 143, 160–63 Cardoso, F., 74–76, 80–83, 86–87, 171n Carroll, L., 117–18 Chang, K., 15, 144, 151, 157 Charusheela, S., 150, 170n Chatterjee, P., 1, 14, 15, 17, 18, 23, 50, 53, 89, 170n Chenery, H., 45, 50–52, 61, 111, 121 Collier, P., 130, 131, 152 colonial administration, 17 colonialism, 15, 18–21, 28, 50, 59, 68–74, 83, 85, 86, 138, 161 coloniality of power, 88–90 colonial representations, developing country as Other, 22, 28, 33, 46, 47, 59, 70, 78, 84, 88, 89, 118, 172n Cowen, M., 34 Darity, W., 107 Dependency and Development in Latin America (Cardoso and Faletto), 80–83 dependency school: as colonial discourse, 75, 86–89; critique of Eurocentrism in development theories, 56, 58, 69–74; masculinism of, 85–86 developmentalism, 16, 69, 74, 75, 89, 170n Diaz-Alejandro, C., 104–5 Dirlik, A., 85, 145, 156

196

INDEX

Domar, E., 13, 38 Dos Santos, T., 68, 74–76, 81, 84, 89 dual economy models, 39–40, 57, 71 Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), 25, 26, 76–80; dependency critiques of, 78–80 economic nationalism, 9, 12, 27–29, 77 economics (discipline); nation-state as object of, 1, 2, 4–14, 17, 29, 34, 44, 48–49, 52, 66, 87; and rationality, 9, 22, 32, 38, 67, 87, 93, 102, 126, 158; rhetoric of, 8, 12, 20, 23, 40, 49, 97, 108 economy, representation of: and colonialism, 14–18; nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conceptions of, 8–9; as object of managerial expertise, 10–13, 20–36, 66; as produced by binarisms, 3, 22, 57–59, 72, 85, 137, 174n. See also capitalism; national economy Elson, D., x, 22, 128, 130–35, 150, 151–52, 173n Enlightenment, 2, 16, 23, 24, 55, 68, 83, 87, 167n Escobar, A., xi, 3, 4, 22, 31, 38, 56, 88, 90, 97, 125, 137–38, 160, 165n, 170n essentialism, 71–73, 75, 84, 86, 127 Eurocentrism: challenges to, 72–76; in dependency theory, 83–85; temporal distancing and, 70 expertise, development economics as culture of, 66, 98–102, 124–27, 139; and mathematical modeling, 100, 105 Fabian, J., 70 Faletto, E., 74, 80–83, 86–87, 171n Fals Borda, O., 69, 89 feminism: analyzes economic development, 48, 58–60, 63, 129, 148, 150–51; and nation building, 20, 21; and resistance to globalization, 150–51, 156–63 feminist economics, 22–23, 97, 101–2, 148–50 feminist macroeconomics, 130–38; and feminist empiricism, 132

Ferguson, J., xi, 97, 111, 169n, 174n Fischer, S., 94–95, 99 Fishlow, A., 78 Folbre, N., 130, 132 Foucault, M., 7, 49, 165n, 167n Foxley, A., 113 Frank, A. G., 68, 71–72, 75–88, 89, 171n Fraser, N., 137 Furtado, C., 68 gender: and colonial binaries, 3, 22, 57–59, 72, 85, 137, 174n; hypermasculinity in development theory, 85; and modernization theory, 49, 57–60, 72; and nation building, 2, 3, 8, 15, 18–23; and social science knowledge, 49–50 Gibson-Graham, J. K., 84, 127, 157–60, 174n globalization: challenges to, 156–63; conventional representations of, 142–48; and feminist political economy, 148–56; as related to demise of the nation-state, 140–41; universal narratives of, 143, 160–63 governmentality: de‹ned, 16–17, 34; in feminist economics, 135–36; of structural adjustment models, 109, 115–18, 138–39 Grewal, I., 155, 161, 163 Grosfoguel, R., 77, 83, 89 gross national product (GNP): dethronement of, 36, 56, 60–61, 63; and origins of development economics, 40–41 Grown, C., 151–52 Gupta, A., 75 Harcourt, W., 137–38 Harding, S., 49, 101, 132 Harrod, R., 13, 38, 45, 115, 169n Harrod-Domar growth model, 36, 38, 42–46, 52–53, 112–13, 115; critiques of, 43–44 Harvey, D., 160 Haq, M. U., 60 Hayek, F., 31

Index Heidegger, M., 48–49 Heilperin, M., 9 Helleiner, E., 8–10 Hirschman, A., 1, 5, 13, 69, 168n, 171n Hirst, P., 147 Hobsbawm, E., 5, 9, 18 Hooper, C., 158 hybridity and economic difference, 73–74, 85–86, 157–58 imagined economic community, 1–2, 23, 34–35, 45–47, 66, 106–8 imperialism, 25, 78, 80–81, 86, 125 institutionalist economics, 53–55 International Labor Organization (ILO), 61–62 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 91, 93–97, 102, 109, 114, 116–20, 125 Johnson, H., 9, 27 Kalpagam, U., 17 Kaplan, C., 155, 161, 163 Kaul, N., 118 Kayetekin, S., 141, 144–47 Keynes, J. M., 4, 6, 10, 13, 15, 17, 37–38, 102, 119 Krueger, A., 116–17 Kuznets, S., 11, 13, 30, 42, 168n legibility, and development economics, 30–36, 44–45, 50, 54, 63, 66, 87, 93, 123 Lewis, W. A., 30, 33, 39–40, 42, 56–59, 69, 71 Lind, A., 137, 162–63 Ling, L. H. M., 15, 144, 151, 157 List, F., 8, 25–26, 77, 167n local knowledges, marginalization of, in development economics, 13–14, 18, 30–35 Lyotard, J. F., 98 Manzo, K., 86, 88 Marchand, M., x, 3, 97, 130, 136, 154

197

Marxism and development theory, 4–5, 12–13, 69–70, 72, 79, 88 McClintock, A., 3, 70 McCloskey, D., ix, 3, 70, 97–98, 101, 169n McNamara, R., 60–61, 64–65 Medley, J., 117–18 Mehmet, O., 47–48 Merchant, C., 8 metaphors: adult/child, 24; economy as family, 23, 107; economy as organism, 8; physics metaphors, 24–25; stage theory, 69–70 Mill, J., 15 Mill, J. S., 9 Mirowski, P., 104 Mitchell, T., xi, 6–8, 11, 49, 122, 169n modernist economics: centering, certainty, and ordering in, 32; and national economy as managerial unit, 5–12, 38; and uncertainty, 37 modernization theory, 18, 21, 30, 46–47, 56–61, 69, 74, 89–90, 171n; and dependency school, 71–73; as gendered narrative, 57, 72 Mohanty, C., 22, 134–35 Montiel, P., 103, 104, 106, 172n Myrdal, G., 5, 43, 47, 53–57, 168n Nandy, A., 2, 24, 85 Narayan, U., 153 national economy: as cohesive collective, 1–2, 23, 34–35, 45–47, 66, 106–8; and managerial ideal, 10–13, 66; as object of development, ix, 1, 2, 4–14, 17, 29, 34, 44, 48–49, 52, 66, 87 nationalism: and economic theory, 9–12; and feminism, 20–23; and modernity, 23–26, 29, 49, 56; and postcolonial identity, 19 national sovereignty: ECLA on, 25; as Enlightenment ideal, 24–29, 75 Neff, S., 9 Nehru, J., 14, 16 neostructuralist macroeconomics, 118–30

198

INDEX

Nurkse, R., 13 Parpart, J., 3, 97 Peterson, V., x, 174n Phillips, A. W., 34 Poovey, M., 8–9 Popper, K., 31 Porter, D., 62, 66 protectionism, 26 Pujol, M., 157 Quijano, A., 28, 88–89 Rahnema, M., 40 Rai, S., 20–21 Reich, R., 141 representative agent model, 106, 108 Resnick, S., 83, 97, 157 Revised Minimum Standard Model (RMSM), 42, 52–53, 111–12, 115, 121 Ricardo, D., 9, 26 Rosa, K., 159 Rosenstein-Rodan, P., 42, 121 Rostow, W., 24, 46–47, 57, 69 Ruccio, D., 12, 32, 51, 83, 97, 100, 120, 126, 135, 142, 144, 147 Runyan, A., 130, 136, 154 Sachs, W., 97, 165n Said, E., 50, 70 Samuelson, P., 23, 107 Sassen, S., 141 Schultz, T., 33 Scott, C., 3, 22, 57–58, 72, 85, 174n Scott, J., 3, 17, 30, 42, 45, 58, 100 Seeing like a State (J. Scott), 30–32 Seers, D., 63–64 Sen, A., 63 Sen, G., 59, 155 Sent, E., 169n, 172n Shackle, G. L. S., 34, 108 Shenton, R., 34 social engineering, and development theory, 17, 31–32, 55, 57–58 Spivak, G. C., xii, 156, 161 state: as agent of modernization, 14–16,

18; strengthened role in structural adjustment policy-making, 116 Stiglitz, J., 95, 99, 110, 111, 141, 172n, 173n Stoler, A., 18, 166n, 167n Streeten, P., 53 structural adjustment: as culture of expertise, 98–102; IMF approach, 103–10; neostructuralist approach, 118–27; World Bank approach, 111–17 Summers, L., 91–92 Taylor, F., and scienti‹c management, 10–11, 35 Taylor, L., 95–96, 102, 104, 111, 119–30, 135, 147, 172n, 173n Tinbergen, J., 6, 10, 13 Tinker, I., 59 Thompson, G., 147 Tripp, A., 159 Viner, J., 41–42 Wallerstein, I., 24, 167n Waring, M., 157 Washington consensus, 91–92, 113, 174n Weintraub, E., 44–45 Williams, E., 72–73 Wolff, R., 83, 97, 157 women: colonial representations of, 20, 22, 134–36; and nationalist movements, 18–21; and reproductive labor, 136–38; as “shock absorbers” of structural adjustment measures, 134 Wood, C., 58–59, 137, 151, 174n World Bank: colonial discourse of, 57, 117–18; gender biases of, 131–35, 150, 174n; McNamara and, 61–63; planning model, 40, 42, 52, 65, 169n; structural adjustment and, 110–17, 141, 144–45, 147, 170n, 172n Youngs, G., 150 Yuval-Davis, N., 19 Zein-Elabdin, E., 151