How Development “Works” and Why It Shouldn’t: New Metaphors for a Post-Development Era

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How Development “Works” and Why It Shouldn’t:

New Metaphors for a Post-Development Era

Wynne Hedlesky

Department of Science and Technology Studies

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Presented at Generative Justice: Value from the Bottom Up

June 28, 2014

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INTRODUCTION

The metaphor of “development” has become such a ubiquitous way of talking and

thinking about social, economic, and technological change in the global South that it is difficult

not to use it. However, use of metaphors, I argue, can have important political implications.

Metaphors can be strategically chosen and used in hopes that that the social/material world will

come to reflect the structure of the metaphor. In this paper I will argue that, as a metaphor,

“development” often works, cognitively speaking, by constructing people and societies in the

global South as inferior to and lagging behind Northern societies along a deterministic path

conceived of as leading naturally and inevitably to Northern-style economic, social, and

technological systems. I suggest that scholars and planners begin trying to think about social,

economic, and technological processes in the global South through the metaphor of ecology

instead, a metaphor that is potentially much more conducive to locally-initiated, generative forms

of value production and flow.

In making the case for “ecology” as a metaphor for social, economic, and technological

processes in the global South that might someday supplant “development,” I will first review

some of the literature that has inspired my approach. I will then focus in detail on George

Lakoff’s theory of metaphor, introducing some of his key ideas about metaphors and how they

work, cognitively speaking. Then, I will compare “development” and “ecology” in terms of these

key concepts, and draw out some connections to generative justice. Finally, I will discuss an

example from the country of Laos that will hopefully help illuminate how “thinking

ecologically” could provide a conceptual framework for imagining and implementing

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sociotechnical systems in which resources and value circulate locally to the benefit of those who

produce them, one of the primary traits of “generative” systems.

POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUES

I am hardly the first to critique conventional development discourse. Many postcolonial

scholars have told the story of the invention of the idea of development shortly after WWII. They

locate the most significant early use of the word in the context of a comprehensive plan of action

toward non-industrialized parts of the world in President Truman’s 1949 inaugural address

(Escobar 1995; Esteva 2010; Rist 2008; Sachs 1990). Their analyses focus on the connotations of

the word “development,” and how the application of this word to those living in the global South

(re)defined their status in a hierarchy of societies, both to themselves, as well as to Northern

actors. Although I am heavily indebted to these critical analyses of development discourse, my

approach varies slightly insofar as I focus closely on discursive choices as metaphor choices.

Building on the conceptual tools developed George Lakoff, I introduce the strategic use of

“affordances” offered by metaphors.

HOW METAPHORS WORK: KEY CONCEPTS

In this section, I will present three of Lakoff’s key concepts that I will use to compare

“development” and “ecology” as metaphors, as well as introduce my own concept of metaphor

affordances to help understand how certain structural characteristics of metaphors are

strategically chosen and used.

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Source Domain/Target Domain

Lakoff’s concepts of source domain and target domain suggest that the way metaphor

works is that the structure and relationships of a “source domain”—usually something well

known whose structure is understood—are mapped onto aspects of a less-well-known target

domain. Scope, logic, and interrelations are more or less maintained so that the metaphor makes

the target understood like the source. This is why metaphors are useful; they anchor new

meanings to ones that are already understood. At the same time, this mapping can impart

unacknowledged cognitive allowances and constraints. Often, familiar spatial concepts are

mapped in this way onto more abstract temporal changes. This basic metaphor is what Lakoff

calls the “event structure metaphor,” which is a basic mapping of spatial terms—“space, motion,

and force”—onto temporal notions such as “states, changes, processes, actions, causes, purposes,

and means” (Lakoff 1993:220). Through what Lakoff calls “inheritance hierarchies,” more

complex metaphors “inherit” the structures of basic metaphors. Lakoff provides the example of

“a meaningful life is a journey,” which shares the basic structure of the “event structure

metaphor” insofar as spatial concepts are mapped onto temporal changes and processes, but

suggests in addition which processes/states are mapped onto what type of spatial motion. The

concept of “development,” I argue, can also be analyzed similarly.

Etymologically, the word “development” means un-folding. In the case of “development”

as metaphor, the basic spatial movement of “unfolding” is mapped onto

social/economic/technological changes in the global South. In order for this metaphor to work,

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cognitively, these processes must be assumed to have a similar structure to the motion of

“unfolding.” This is where I will introduce the idea of metaphor affordances.

Metaphor Affordances

Although not part of Lakoff’s system, I find the concept of metaphor affordances helpful

in understanding the real-world implications of metaphor choices. I define metaphor affordances

as structural aspects of the source domain that can be strategically used to ensure that the target

domain is understood in particular ways. The term “strategic” is meant to differentiate between

“unintended” consequences that accompany a metaphor, versus consequences which are linked

to either individual or group political or social intentions, movements or formations. For

example, the metaphor of darkness as ignorance appears in ancient societies (Greek, Egyptian,

etc.) where skin color is not a social issue. It is only later that it becomes a strategic affordance,

as in Joseph Conrad’s story “heart of darkness” which is about colonialism in Africa. (Gabriel

2007). Conversely, Hacking (1999) notes that the “war” metaphors—the “war on drugs,” the

“war on poverty”—has been strategically introduced to imply the beneficial and necessary

aspects of military warfare from the start. Thus without an understanding of metaphor

affordance, we cannot distinguish between these radically different phenomena. In this case it a

specific affordance of the development metaphor—that of “unfolding”—which has important

political implications for how social/economic/technological changes in the global South are

understood.

First, “unfolding” is a motion that happens in one direction, from folded up and obscured,

to open and visible. Although, in some contexts “folding” may be a desirable process—for

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example, if you’re making an origami crane—in many other situations unfolding is implicitly

valued. For example, opening an envelope or unwrapping a gift allows access to and knowledge

of something important or desirable that was previously hidden or inaccessible. As this metaphor

was taken up in the biological sciences to refer to the normal life processes of organisms, it took

on the additional affordance of inevitability; “unfolding” became not only desirable, but

deterministic as well. Different degrees of obscurity or coverage came to map onto different

stages in the normal, pre-determined life cycle of an organism. Taken up and utilized with

reference to social/economic/technological changes in the global South, full visibility maps onto

the achievement of Northern social/economic/technological systems, and different degrees of

coverage map onto different stages of advancement toward this implicitly desirable goal.

Additionally, drawing from the deterministic affordance of the development metaphor, this

process is considered inevitable; the innate, natural potentialities of human societies are

gradually realized over time, although they can be delayed due to pathological defects in

Southern societies.

Also from the use of the development metaphor within biology comes another important

affordance of the “development” metaphor—its universailty. Assuming that all individuals of a

particular species are fundamentally the same, “normal” biological development should look the

same in all individual bodies. A brief passage from the work of a developmental biologist

provides a nice example of both the deterministic and universal affordances of the development

metaphor:

We think of development as a process of inexorable progressive change by which a single

cell is transformed into a complex multicellular organism, made up of many tissues and

organs, each with a distinctive structure and function. In any given species, the

progression from the simple to the complex occurs in an orderly fashion that is repeated

with little or no variation in millions of individuals, generation after generation (Nijhout

1999).

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Only some sort of atypical pathological condition could prevent the “inexorable” process of

normal development. When extended from biological to social processes, the development

metaphor implies that, just as normal physiological development looks the same in “millions of

individuals,” “normal” social development should look the same in all human societies—that is,

unless some sort of social pathology is at work.

These two affordances—determinism and universality—allow users of the development

metaphor to construct societies in the global South as inferior, abnormal, as lagging behind,

those in the North. Additionally, the transitive sense of “develop,” in which there is a developer,

one who actively uncovers, permits a third affordance to be added to these two: “development”

demands centrally-organized interventions. Here, the actor who unfolds or uncovers something

can be compared to Northern planners, scientists, and economists, who guide societies in the

global South in establishing correct social/economic/technological systems.

Of course, these are not the only affordances of the development metaphor. One could

also draw on, for example, understandings of “development” as a more open-ended process,

stressing, say, biological examples in which there are multiple potential pathways of

development. For example, in insects such as ants and termites a larva can become a worker, a

soldier, or a queen, depending on stimuli. Because the possible affordances of a metaphor are

more numerous than those actually utilized, drawing on specific affordances can be seen as a

strategic choice which provides cognitive possibilities and constraints that are expedient in

certain contexts. It would not be entirely correct to call the decision to utilize the affordances

discussed above as “intentional” or “strategic” in the sense of a conspiracy by a single evil

individual, just as it would certainly be incorrect to exonerate those involved as innocently

trapped by linguistic accident. Rather the choice is the result of social and political formations

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whose historical roots postcolonial scholars such as those I mentioned earlier have done an

excellent job of uncovering. Although President Truman, in his famous “Point Four” speech,

may not have selected the development metaphor because of some long-term, strategic plan, now

that it is in common usage a certain range of its affordances—determinism, universality, and

active engagement—are certainly used strategically to perpetuate a particular understanding of

social/economic/technological processes in the global South.

Metaphor Realization

Quoting George Lakoff, “Metaphors impose a structure on real life, through the creation

of new correspondences in experience” (Lakoff 1993:241). He gives the example of a

thermometer. A thermometer realizes, in a material object, the metaphor of “up is more.” Once

realized in this way, the thermometer itself can become the source domain for new metaphors

(for example, we might say someone is “taking the temperature” of a situation).

However, not all metaphor realizations are so politically benign. For example, the

“development” metaphor has become realized in a variety of institutions that impose very real

and at times unwanted constraints on some people in the global South. Additionally, once the

metaphor of “development” is realized in the form of social and material constraints, people may

come to think themselves through this metaphor; for these groups the affordance loses its

“strategic” character as the choice has already been implemented, and the pathway becomes a

self-fulfilling prophecy. In the words of Rahnema, “not only individuals and communities but

entire nations and continents were led to believe that they were poor, and in need of assistance,

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only because their per capita income was below a universally established minimum” (Rahnema

2010:179).

As postcolonial scholars argue, this broad categorization of societies into “developed”

and “underdeveloped” had little to do with the experienced needs of those in the global South,

and much to do with the strategic choice of a metaphor that could be realized in institutions that

perpetuated the dominance of Northern political, economic, and epistemological systems.

COMPARING METAPHORS

Comparing the Affordances of “Development” and “Ecology”

In this section, I will turn to the metaphor of “ecology,” and compare some key

affordances of these two metaphors insofar as they can be used to think about

social/economic/technological processes in the global South. In thinking about ecology as

metaphor, I am indebted to Lorraine Code and her extensive work on what she calls “ecological

thinking.”

On the one hand, as discussed, “development” is deterministic; there is one correct way

to “live well,” to use Code’s language, which involves technological advancement and economic

growth. On the other hand, one of the affordances of “ecology” as metaphor is that it is

multidirectional and non-deterministic. There are many different ways to “live well,” and they

cannot be fully determined ahead of time. Organisms and communities of organisms are

constantly adapting to each other and a changing environment in ways that are difficult to predict

with certainty.

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“Development” is also universal. It is the same for all human societies everywhere on

earth. On the other hand, Code emphasizes the “ecological thinking” ability to comprehend

particularity, it’s “sensitivity to detail, to minutiae.” For example, ecologists Emmerson et al.

(2001) show that as species diversity increases, ecosystems become increasingly “idiosyncratic”

with great regional variations in species composition. When the local variation empirically

observed within biological ecosystems becomes a metaphor for social processes, it becomes

thinkable that there are multiple ways for human beings to “live well,” which vary highly from

place to place, between and within societies.

Another affordance of “development” is top-down, centralized organization. Northern

societies know how to “live well” and must distribute knowledge and resources to Southern

societies. On the other hand, “ecological” systems are self-organizing. No central authority

controls the flow of nutrients, water, and so on in a healthy ecosystem, yet its members thrive.

Thinking of social processes with this metaphor, it seems reasonable for resources to circulate

and needs to be met without centrally-located expertise or coordination.

Comparing “Ecological Thinking” and “Generative Justice”

Now that we know a bit more about some affordances of the “ecology” metaphor, we can

see how an “ecological” understanding of the production and flow of resources and value might

be quite similar to a “generative” understanding. One key concept of “generative justice” is the

idea that the value produced by labor or nature remains within the social or natural system where

it was produced, rather than being extracted and either concentrated in the possession of others,

or redistributed to labor or nature by some centralized authority. There are powerful similarities

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between generative circulation and the idea of nutrient cycling from ecological science, which

describes the movement through an ecosystem of the chemical substances necessary for life.

Other conceptual connections between ecology and generative justice, such as, for example, the

importance of feedback loops and dynamic equilibrium, might also be productive to explore.

As discussed in the introduction to this collection, “generative justice” refers to both the

social and the organic, value that originates from human labor or creative expression, as well as

from biological nature. Examples from the introduction include open source computer software,

indigenous arts, “protest technologies,” and others. It is important to point out that the ecological

metaphor can function similarly, referring to social, as opposed to biological, processes.

Focusing on non-organic examples can help get beyond biological interpretations of the

ecological metaphor. However, the work of several authors demonstrates that the ecological

metaphor, like any metaphor, offers affordances that, when utilized to understand the social

world, can be used to support sexist, racist, and other oppressive social relations. For example,

Sarah Ray’s Ecological Other documents how the ecological metaphor has been used to frame

immigrants as external pollutants. Haraway’s “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” describes the use of

ecological thinking to support concepts of “genetic contamination” from lower economic classes

and sexist notions of “natural” family structure. By showing how ecological dynamics apply

equally well to “artificial” value circulation such as open source, generative justice helps to show

how we can take advantage of the metaphorical affordances of ecological thinking without the

organicist hegemony—while the authors cited above remind us that more is required to support

generative systems that simply choosing the right metaphor.

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AN EXAMPLE FROM THE GLOBAL SOUTH

I will now discuss an example of a social/economic/technological arrangement in the

global South thatillustrates the relationship between “ecological thinking” and “generative

justice.” This system currently meets the needs of particular communities better than projects

undertaken within “development” thinking are able to do. Although these actors would not

necessarily describe themselves as “thinking ecologically,” I would like to suggest that the

deliberate invocation of certain affordances of the ecological metaphor could create possibilities

for increased institutional support of such systems and clear the way for their expanded

implementation.

Pico-hydropower in Northern Laos: Background Information

First I will provide some basic information about electricity generation in Laos. Laos is a

rugged, landlocked country of around 6.5 million inhabitants in mainland Southeast Asia.

Although hydroelectricity is one of the small country’s major exports, as of 2009, only 10% of

the energy generated from large dams in the country was available for domestic use (Smits and

Bush 2010). Most of it is exported to its neighbors. In 2008, the national electric grid supplied

only 60% of households, far below the government’s 2020 goal 90% electrification (Smits and

Bush 2010). Many rural villagers, especially in the mountainous North, are unlikely to be hooked

up to the national power grid for years. Instead, they often turn to decentralized power generation

technologies, such as pico-hydropower.

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Pico-hydro generators usually produce under 1 Kw of power, and provide electricity to

one or two homes. Smits and Bush (2010) estimate that pico-hydro generators supply electricity

for as many as 90,000 people in Laos, mostly in the mountainous northern part of the country.

However, they found that government and NGO actors alike tend to consider pico-hydropower to

be, to quote their findings, “a source of off-grid electrification not even worth supporting” (Smits

and Bush 2009). Many policy actors seem to believe that pico-hydro systems were dangerous,

inefficient, and that they were not and could not be widely used in Laos, even as the current

reality was otherwise.

Pico-hydropower as Ecological and Generative System

This example demonstrates four qualities of ecological systems: pico-hydropower

systems in Laos are self-organizing; they adapt to local conditions; resources within these

systems cycle internally; and they are—except for the manufacture of its physical mechanism--

self-sufficient. However this self-sufficiency is by no means purely “natural” in an organicist

sense: as stressed in the generative justice framework, it is as much about the generation of value

in the “artificial” realms of labor, knowledge and trade networks. First, the material equipment

and technological expertise needed to install and operate pico-hydro generators in Laos flows

through self-organizing networks of users and suppliers, rather than top-down distribution from a

government institution or charity organization. Generators enter the country from neighboring

China and Vietnam. They are distributed through local shop owners and traveling merchants who

bring equipment to remote villages. This happens without government or NGO support—as we

have seen, it happens despite these development institutions and government officials who are

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hostile to their very existence. Second, aided by the knowledge gained through experience and

through each other, local residents adapt standard pico-hydro units to particular conditions that

vary highly from village to village.

It’s worth noting that these generators come with no instructions in the Lao language; the

expertise required to install and use them develops locally within networks of merchants and end

users. Given that the equipment itself is produced outside of Laos, this expertise is arguably the

most important self-generated resource in the system; it cycles within these local networks (my

third characteristic of “ecological” systems), transmitting both explicit verbal knowledge as well

as what Collins (2001) calls tacit knowledge, the knowledge that comes with embodied, adaptive

activity within social networks, akin to how Lave (1990) describes learning as occurring within

“communities of practice.” We might term the generation and circulation of such cognitive

resources “epistemological self-sufficiency.” This is in contrast to government- and NGO-

supported versions of decentralized electricity generation programs in the country, which usually

mandate that installation and repairs are done by licensed individuals, normally for a fee, which

poses major inconveniences to those living in remote parts of the country on low incomes.

Although pico-hydropower systems already exist and are filling basic needs without

explicitly invoking “ecological thinking,” I suggest there may be some benefits to more

deliberately calling upon concepts from ecology in support of pico-hydropower projects. For

example, if policy actors were encouraged to “think ecologically,” they may come to understand

how locally-specific, highly adaptive, self-organizing systems can provide successful solutions to

problems that may at first seem almost intractable, such as rural electrification in a mountainous

country with minimal infrastructure and low population density. This realization may or may not

compel any kind of direct intervention; it may merely encourage policy makers and planners to

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create space for communities to develop these solutions more or less independently. “Thinking

ecologically” about the pico-hydro generation that is already occurring in Laos might also reduce

the negative attitudes that Smits and Bush found among policy actors in the country’s capital,

and encourage a de-emphasis on grid expansion, the Lao government’s current priority, which is

linked to controversial plans to build dozens of new large hydroelectric dams throughout the

country.

CONCLUSION AND FURTHER THOUGHTS

I will finish this essay with a quote from Lorrain Code, and some questions it raises.

Ultimately, ecological thinking offers the potential to re-imagine the roles of government and

citizens, NGOs and technology experts in forging solutions to difficult

social/economic/technological problems. As Lorrain Code states (2006:24), “ecological thinking

is not simply thinking about ecology or about the environment: it generates revisioned modes of

engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency,

which pervade and reconfigure theory and practice alike.”

The gap between this ambitious vision for a radically democratic alternative to

“development” and the realities of on-the-ground relationships creates several questions. First,

how can we motivate development agencies and government actors in Laos, or anywhere else, to

make the shift from the “development” framework to one based on “ecological thinking,” given

the entrenched forms of power that development serves? Second, clearly a simple act of

switching terminology will not be enough, as one could simply reinterpret the meaning of the

word “ecological” from Code’s radical vision to one convergent with current development

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frameworks. But what exactly are the practices—discursive, material, institutional, and so on—

that can be used as evaluative platforms to make that distinction between lip service to the

ecological framework and its actual implementations? Finally, how can we distinguish between

the kind of authentic bottom-up cycles which, as I have attempted to illustrate with the case of

pico-hydropower, is already happening, and the Foucaultian illusions of “participation”

highlighted work such as Cooke and Kothari (2001) in their critical work on participatory

development?

It is in these kinds of questions that I think the relationship between ecological thinking

as described by Code, and the generative justice described in this anthology, offer a profound

intervention. While ecology offers a rich set of metaphors and visualizations for conceptualizing

grassroots social justice undertakings, and a possible way to unite various projects under a

common epistemological framework, it is not as clear how to “translate” these features into the

terminology and practices that the current development community understands. Generative

justice provides models for showing how ecological thinking translates into domains such as

software engineering and civil rights, in particular using the concept of “value generation” as a

lingua franca of ecological self-sufficiency across these disparate domains. Although I do

believe that the affordances of the “development” metaphor inherently close off the possibility of

democratic deliberations about social, economic, and technological changes in the global South,

adopting the metaphor of “ecology” does not automatically create space for these deliberations.

Creating these spaces takes work: as I see it, both “ecological thinking” and “generative justice”

are not instant solutions, but rather tools to make that work lighter.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Ron Eglash for his assistance in editing this chapter as well as his

suggestions of several additional examples to clarify and illuminate the concepts of development,

ecology, and generative justice, their functioning as metaphors, and their interrelations.

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