Post-development advocates and decolonial thinkers are calling for radical alternatives to development, but how do these ideals sit with the day-to-day reality of marginalised communities struggling with poverty, precarity, and the deprivation of human rights?
This book investigates how post-development alternatives are being understood and negotiated on the ground in the Global South. Indigenous concepts and practices attributed to people in the Global South are seen by post-development thinkers as offering transformative alternatives to dominant development models of progress and economic growth. For example, buen vivir from particular regions of South America points to a ‘culture of life’ and ubuntu in Southern Africa emphasises human connectedness and mutuality. Such terms are associated with social and environmental sustainability, and a greater connection to Southern epistemologies. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this book takes us directly to Global South communities from around the world, to consider the complex ways in which they negotiate the ideas and practices associated with (post)development, and their views on the supposed indigenous alternatives. The book encourages a contextual approach that embraces the tensions and contradictions that exist within different communities.
Taking the reader from abstract post-development theory right into the heart of communities directly impacted by development, this book will be an important guide for students, researchers and practitioners looking for better ways to address the desires and aspirations of marginalised communities in the Global South.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction PART I: AMBIVALENCE, NOSTALGIA, COMPLEXITY 2. In search of post-development alternatives: ubuntu and development in South Africa 3. ‘Hardware’ and ‘software’ bikas: Nepali notions on development and its alternatives 4. Development as nostalgia and reverie in Eastern Rwanda 5. CAMPFIRE and the politics of ambivalence: attitudes towards development in Kanyemba, Zimbabwe PART II: BUEN VIVIR, LIVING WELL AND WELLBEING 6. The vivir bien rhetoric and Afro-Bolivian women’s struggles for recognition and inclusive citizenship 7. Revisiting the indigeneity-modernity relationship: vivir bien in the Bolivian Highlands 8. ‘Money is a universal need’: exploring Indigenous peoples' engagement with externally-led development in the Peruvian Amazon PART III: ALTERNATIVES? 9. Economies of solidarity in Tehran: new commons and diverse economies on the margins? 10. Ontology in action: ecocentrism as defence of place in Indigenous social movement practices, South Africa 11. Ambivalent perspectives on degrowth and alternatives to development: exploring notions of kalamboan and ginhawa in Siquijor province, Philippines 12. Conclusion
About the Author :
Sally Matthews is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa. She is interested in a rather eclectic range of topics – post-development theory, the politics of knowledge production on Africa, the role of NGOs in Africa, higher education transformation and decolonisation – which are all loosely related to the question of whether and how those who occupy positions of privilege can act in the interests of the marginalised and oppressed.
Alba Castellsagué is an Assistant Professor (Lecturer) in the Pedagogy Department at the University of Girona (UdG). She has teaching and research experience in the fields of education and international development, gender equality and migration studies.
Review :
"This book is a must-read exposé on the curious dance between post-development and the Global South. It depicts the question of theory for whom and for what purpose by examining how people engage with development and its alternatives in locations where dire circumstances like poverty, inequality, violence, and deprivation seem to warrant ‘more development’. The book offers highly recommended insights on how the notion of ambivalence is useful to a practical understanding of what (post)development means for people who encounter it daily."
Nathan Andrews, Associate Professor of Political Science, McMaster University, Canada.
"This rich empirical collection offers an urgent challenge to post-development, showing how ambivalence – not brute desire nor repression – characterise how people in the global South really feel about development. This is essential reading requiring critical development scholars and students to depart from romantic and often unintentionally colonising approaches to understanding development’s failures."
Samantha Balaton-Chrimes, Associate Professor of Politics, Deakin University, Australia.
