Lit Review: Theories of Development, Peet and Hartwick

Allison Voglesong

MSU James Madison College

International Relations 2010

MC 320 paper, written 2009.06.01

Part of YDS initiative to share student publications in the spirit of critical dialog. Please comment!

Review of Theories of Development, Richard Peet and Elaine Hartwick, Guilford Press, 1999, 234 pages

Development and Oppositional Space

1.
    There are many ways to explain and understand development. In "Theories of Development," Peet and Hartwick define development as a process of "social reproduction within environments" (288); present and critique its historiography founded in the "positivistic social science" (107) of modernization theory and its "sex-affective production" systems (261); and present an alternative vision of development that supports "subjugated knowledges and oppositional social movements" (279). I find value in the authors' discussion on development "as the social use of economic progress" (275), I agree with their critique of "capitalism as the social form taken by the modern world," and I echo their call for "social control of the reproduction of existence" (276) so that development policy may no longer reflect the preponderance of production, but rather emphasize building "transformative capacity"(121) through what I call constructive opposition.
2.
    Peet and Hartwick illustrate extant development theory as an extension of "modernization," what Parsons synthesized as "the enhancement of adaptive capacity (particularly in the economy's function of using resources effectively) as the main 'advance' projecting 'social evolution'" (118). The value system of modernization secures a "neoevolutionary" and hierarchical social order where "growth [was] founded on capitalist efficiency" (14). Modernization theory's features of structural functionalism -- its systemic organization -- includes social "adaptation, differentiation, [and] integration" (118). Put simply, "how developed a society was could be measured in terms of indices of similarity with the ["structural specialization" (122)] characteristics of modern industrial society" (121). The policies of development characterized by economic neoliberal intention are processes that Peet and Hartwick assert prejudice "instruments of power" over "natural methods of measurement" (11). Therefore, the modernization approach to development is destructive to third world development because its adaptive approach is historically entrenched in the capitalist global structure, and encourages a "bias towards equilibrium" (120) of an imbalanced global power structures -- one that makes development necessary at all.
    The separation of women from natural reproductive practices (i.e. relegation to informal economy labor) supports modernization development theory as a capitalist structure of "power inherent in the theorization of differences" (246). Several of the varying modes of feminism understands the destructive nature of neoliberal development policies for all marginalized and oppressed identities/entities. Modernization's structural functionalism "superimposed the scientific and economic paradigms created by Western gender-biased ideology on communities previously immersed in other cultures with entirely different relations with the natural world" (269). Modernization's pinnacle equilibrium is "imbued with Western notions of the sexual division of labor" (255); Peet and Hartwick believe feminism is relevant because "women arguably are becoming the majority of the new global working class" (242), and that the relationship between "modes of production with social forms of gender relations" (262) has increased women's subordination to men through modern development policies. The separation of public from private modes of production and reproduction are "sex-affective" (261) examples of "how women and their labor [have] been integrated into global capitalism by... core countries [which] explain[s their] marginalization and oppression" (254).
3.
    I share a large portion of Peet and Hartwick's sentiments on development, particularly as it "attends to the social consequences of production" (2), or rather, modernization's "deficiency" (280) in tending to them. Ultimately, we share the desire to seek "a wider strategy of transforming power relations in society at large," so that "all activities employing labor organized through social relations... [are] connected with the direct reproduction of immediate life" (290). Their "critical modernism" approach (Chapter 8) -- more specifically their adoption of "radical democracy" (288) -- seeks to transform development policy into a "directly and cooperatively" managed program to satisfy "locally defined, but universally present, needs" (291).     Contemporary development practices, explained above as under the influence of "modern products of reason" (250), are illustrated by Peet and Hartwick as guilty of: "limited aims (an abundance of things), the timidity of its means (copying the West), and the scope of its conception (experts plan it)" (280). Modernization's limited aims (i.e. structural adjustment goals of IFIs) are to be refocused through radical democracy to entail control... by all its members as direct and equal participants" (289). More importantly, this method reorients development aims towards capacity-building; employing "control over production and reproduction within a democratic politics quite different from either private ownership or state control" (18). Addressing modernization's timidity of its means in terms of socialist feminism Peet and Hartwick seek to "reformulate development in a way that combines, rather than separates, everyday life and the wider societal dimension, with productive activities of all kinds considered as a totality rather than split into [the] hierarchical types" (253) produced by Western structural functionalism.
    I am most enamored by Peet and Hartwick's critical modernist approach to the scope of conception of modern development, which I will refer to as "constructive opposition." Under the auspices of "retention" (281)  of some modernization thought, movement beyond neoliberal development economics requires "several, radically different, socioeconomic models, with free debate among their proponents" (282). I am weary of immediately adopting their recommendation that a "revitalized social democratic/developmental state model" will be able to, by means of whatever ambiguous manifestation, "produce growth with equity" (284). Peet and Hartwick recognize I am not alone in such caution: "interventions into the development process take many forms, some of which are incomparable but even in opposition" (273). What makes their analysis unique is their articulation of social movement opposition in two ways. First, they necessitate opposition against existing development structures, whereby "contradictions provoke crises, the people affected build social movements, and these accumulate into widespread popular opposition to the existing forms of social life" (286).  Similarly, they sew opposition together with the concept of linkages and "social movements, old and new, [as] united in their opposition to resource deprivation" (287). 
4.
    I agree that a re-conceptualized development theory needs oppositional space within and between its various social movements seeking to democratize social reproduction. Somewhat of an opportunity for airing out the defunct contemporary discourse of development, "constructive opposition" allows for the international division of labor to be reevaluated and cooperatively reconstituted. Reproductive capacity can, by this method, be stimulated by social movements, whose "action involves power in the sense of transformative capacity" (121), which is one conception of development theory that I agree with (for now).