Encountering Development

Originally published: 1995. Paperback reissue, with a new preface by the author.

In Territories of Difference, Arturo Escobar, author of the widely debated book Encountering Development, analyzes the politics of difference enacted by specific place-based ethnic and environmental movements in the context of neoliberal globalization. His analysis is based on his many years of engagement with a group of Afro-Colombian activists of Colombia’s Pacific rainforest region, the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN). Escobar offers a detailed ethnographic account of PCN’s visions, strategies, and practices, and he chronicles and analyzes the movement’s struggles for autonomy, territory, justice, and cultural recognition. Yet he also does much more. Consistently emphasizing the value of local activist knowledge for both understanding and social action and drawing on multiple strands of critical scholarship, Escobar proposes new ways for scholars and activists to examine and apprehend the momentous, complex processes engulfing regions such as the Colombian Pacific today. Escobar illuminates many interrelated dynamics, including the Colombian government’s policies of development and pluralism that created conditions for the emergence of black and indigenous social movements and those movements’ efforts to steer the region in particular directions. He examines attempts by capitalists to appropriate the rainforest and extract resources, by developers to set the region on the path of modernist progress, and by biologists and others to defend this incredibly rich biodiversity “hot-spot” from the most predatory activities of capitalists and developers. He also looks at the attempts of academics, activists, and intellectuals to understand all of these complicated processes. Territories of Difference is Escobar’s effort to think with Afro-Colombian intellectual-activists who aim to move beyond the limits of Eurocentric paradigms as they confront the ravages of neoliberal globalization and seek to defend their place-based cultures and territories.

Widely regarded as the standard text on development geography, this volume examines the nature and causes of global inequality and critically analyzes contemporary approaches to economic development across the third world. Students gain a deeper understanding of the interacting dynamics of culture, gender, race, and class; biophysical factors, such as climate, population, and natural resources; and economic and political processesa "all of which have led to the present-day disparities between the first and third worlds. Numerous examples, sidebars, and figures illustrate how people in the global South are experiencing and contesting the forces of globalization. New to This Edition Updated to reflect a decade of economic, political, and social changes Extensively revised; more fully integrates postcolonial and feminist perspectives Broadens the prior edition's focus on Africa with examples from around the world A chapter on the promises and pitfalls of sustainable development.

Questioning the utopian image of western knowledge as a uniquely successful achievement in its application to economic and social development, this provocative volume, the latest in the EIDOS series, argues that it is unacceptable to dismiss problems encountered by development projects as the inadequate implementation of knowledge. Rather, it suggests that failures stem from the constitution of knowledge and its object. By focussing on the ways in which agency in development is attributed to experts, thereby turning previously active participants into passive subjects or ignorant objects, the contributors claim that the hidden agenda to the aims of educating and improving the lives of those in the undeveloped world falls little short of perpetuating ignorance.

This is a collection of over a hundred essays on alternatives to the dominant processes of globalized development, including its structural roots in modernity, capitalism, state domination, and masculinist values. The book presents views and practices from around the world in a collective search for an ecologically and socially just world.

Literature Review from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Development Politics, grade: 1,7, University of Auckland (Centre for Development Studies), course: Contemporary Theories of International Development, language: English, abstract: The field of development studies has seen an endless coming and going of various new paradigms in the latter half of the 20th century. They all claimed to be highly innovative, stirring hope that, after all the dissatisfactory experiences prior to their emergence, the big problems of developing countries can finally be solved. A vast body of major theory on development emerged since the 1940s, such as Modernisation theory, Dependency theory, World-Systems theory, and Neoliberalism with its strucural adjustment programms (Chant & McIlwaine, 2009). In the early to mid-1990s, an outraged collection of texts, highly critical of all those conventional development approaches, emerged. In contrast to former controversies, these writings were novel in the way that they casted “a serious doubt not only on the feasibility but on the very desirability of development” itself (Escobar, 2000, p. 11), making use of newly revised poststructuralist and discursive approaches. This way of criticism became known as post-development. According to McGregor (2009, p.2), the “most influential and widely read text however” was Escobar’s (1995) Encountering Development: The Naking and Unmaking of the Third World. This article aims to review this book and is divided into three parts. The first section provides a brief summary of the text, followed by an analysis dealing with major potential contradictions and their relative insignificance, closing with the final part by highlighting the huge and unique impact the book had in the field of development studies and especially in the branch of post-development theory.

This book proposes an alternative approach to understanding development and discusses the possibilities of alternative development in the age of global capitalism from a socio-cultural perspective. Tracing the development of Mui Wo, a rural town on the outskirts of Hong Kong, for more than a decade, it explores the factors that have allowed it to stand apart from the metropolis and follow a path of development that is distinct from the rest of Hong Kong. It also discusses how a place and its people, with their own time-space conceptions, respond to the changes prompted by the exigencies of global capitalism. The book goes beyond institutional concerns and focuses on the daily life of ordinary people. It identifies the forces underlying globalisation, addresses what happens when such forces interact with local ones, and explores the resultant diversions and diversifications. The book is an invitation to all those who are interested in reflecting on heterogeneity and diversity amidst the impulses of globalisation.

How did the industrialized nations of North America and Europe come to be seen as the appropriate models for post-World War II societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How did the postwar discourse on development actually create the so-called Third World? And what will happen when development ideology collapses? To answer these questions, Arturo Escobar shows how development policies became mechanisms of control that were just as pervasive and effective as their colonial counterparts. The development apparatus generated categories powerful enough to shape the thinking even of its occasional critics while poverty and hunger became widespread. "Development" was not even partially "deconstructed" until the 1980s, when new tools for analyzing the representation of social reality were applied to specific "Third World" cases. Here Escobar deploys these new techniques in a provocative analysis of development discourse and practice in general, concluding with a discussion of alternative visions for a postdevelopment era.Escobar emphasizes the role of economists in development discourse--his case study of Colombia demonstrates that the economization of food resulted in ambitious plans, and more hunger. To depict the production of knowledge and power in other development fields, the author shows how peasants, women, and nature became objects of knowledge and targets of power under the "gaze of experts."