Development Decoded

President Truman’s speech in 1949 inaugurated the era of development in the way Robert McNamara’s speech in1973 reflected the shift within its discursive field. The Nairobi speech was essentially an address to the board of governors of the World Bank by McNamara, the then President of the Bank. He contested the effectiveness of the accumulation-centric approach in eliminating poverty and discrimination and emphasized on the need for an alternative approach. There emerged a strong case for redefining the objective of development by bringing in the alleviation of absolute poverty as the goal of developmental interventions.

 In the previous decades, the Bank’s lending policy focused on infrastructure building- e.g. Power plants, transport and communications mainly for modern industries in urban areas. Since these investments enhanced productivity in the modern sector, their economic returns were tangible and measurable providing an economic justification of the projects. The Bank moved away from the Social sector and was hesitant to fund health or educational programs because according to the Bank, they were only remotely linked to productivity and growth.

The 1970’s popularly referred to as the McNamara years saw significant changes in the Bank’s lending policy with funds being pumped into several anti-poverty programs. In fact, Bank lending for agriculture and rural development increased from 18% in fiscal 1968 to 31% in fiscal 1981. The composition of lending within agriculture dramatically switched from irrigation and infrastructure related investments to poverty-oriented rural development projects for benefit of the rural poor. Funds were also allocated to low-cost urban housing, slum rehabilitation and primary education. The World Bank, however, was not the only institution that envisioned the new perspective. Several UN forums, the Tinbergen Report and the Report of the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation firmly stressed the need to redefine the goals of development and proposed an agenda with basic need satisfaction as its top priority. The ILO launched its World Employment Program (WEP) to attempt research on urban poverty and reasoned in favour of treating employment as a separate goal of development. Now, the space of developmental planning brought to the fore the state’s welfarist role by involving a direct planned attack on poverty. Michel Foucault, a French social theorist, called this phenomenon ‘governmentalization’ of the developmental state.

Foucault’s analysis of power refers exclusively to the advanced modern society of the west, but the conceptual tools it offers can be productively used for an understanding of some of the power regime of third world countries. In exploring the nature of subjugation and control in contemporary western societies, he offers a diachronic account of power. The central point he makes is that power in the form of sovereignty has been supplanted in these societies by a new form he calls Governmentality: that there has been a governmentalization of the state. Sovereignty is premised on the concept of law and right, and when the sovereign is exercised on the social body, it works in terms of restriction, prohibition and denial. Governmentality, on the other hand, refers to the management of the social body in terms of interventions on the part of the state aimed at promoting the welfare of society. The purpose of these interventions is to activate and arouse the subjects rather than constrict and repress them. 

The two paradigms of power, sovereignty and governmentality, are fundamentally different in their nature and modality. While the sovereign power is repressive, governmentality as a form of power is productive. The subjects of the sovereign power are the citizens with rights who participate in the sovereignty of the state but in its governmental law, the state views the social space as inhabited by a population. The population is constituted through enumeration, quantification and classification by a census and surveys conducted by the government. Population groups are identified as targets of policies, as objects on which Governmentality can be exercised. Thus, with the rise of the governmental function of the state as the dominant mode of power, the citizens who were subjects of the sovereign dissolve into the population and become objects of governance.