Decentering Development Epistemology By Kelson Maynard

 

Decentering Development Epistemology

The reigning epistemological ideologies of western Europe and Euro-American – market capitalism, materialism, and the notion of inevitable progress – which have prevailed for several centuries, from the fifteenth century to the present, have resulted in the cultural model of industrial growth and a way of life centered on consumption.  This has resulted in widespread planetary distress.  The wounding of the planet earth is evident everywhere on every continent, the oceans, and the environment.  It is tearing apart the fabric of floral, faunal, and human life on earth.

This developmental model has clearly failed for the majority of the earth’s inhabitants.  Yet, many post-colonial bourgeoise leadership classes, shaped by the epistemologies of western Europe and Euro-America, continue to replicate the colonial economic, political, and cultural systems, rather than dismantle them.  These bourgeois colonial leadership classes have relied on national capitalist extractive industrialism as a path to the flourishing of their citizens has served to entrench inequality and poverty. This pattern of development and its accompanying epistemologies contaminates the social reality of these ex-colonial countries and territories.  A social reality conditioned by the legacies of capitalism, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, neo-imperialism, and its commensurable ethos of domination.

Ethos refers to a person’s or people’s moral character.  In his The Wretched of the Earth Fanon warned about the consequences mimicking the colonizers.  On a fundamental level ex-colonials have been forced to or unwittingly participate in this developmental and epistemological system that alienates them from their history and culture.  In many ‘independent underdeveloped’ colonial relations continue to exist.  They are dependent on colonialism for their independence.  Development in this system includes the acquisition of those skills and tools of the dominant knowledge system that will empower the minority and disempower most of the people. Thus, development projects end up reproducing the same oppressive power dynamics and knowledge system. Hence, these ex-colonial countries and territories’ relationship to capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and neo-imperialism remain the same.

The need for post development epistemology seems obvious.  The decentering of the ‘narrative of development’ as an economic, political, social, and cultural path for the flourishing of many of the people in ex-colonial countries and territories is imperative.  Without this decentering of the ‘narrative of development’ it will be difficult to produce an alternative epistemology and transitional theory to development. An earnest transitional discourse must be pursued.