Activism, Expertise, Commons

In: Development dialogue, Band 1, Heft 47, S. 149-181

Abstract

The issue of what development is & how it is commonly conceived, is also dealt with in the fifth article of this volume, 'Activism, Expertise, Commons' by Larry Lohmann. For many policymakers & activists, social & political reality is imagined to be divided into two parts: what Lohmann terms 'disembodied, potent, transcendental, 'global' entities' such as 'globalization' & their alleged counterpart in the 'local' & 'particular'. Through such dualisms emerges, among other things, a view of development as being a process of planning, taming, organising & rationalising undeveloped, natural, irrational or unmapped domains. However, these dualisms, through which much politics -- tacitly or overtly -- tends to operate, are, he says, subject to incessant collapse. Using three different examples -- dams/development, commodification/'the economy' & science -- Lohmann describes the processes by which the dichotomies are built up & disintegrated. Every development 'master plan' & its implementation, he points out, evolves through an endless chain of revisions, additions, restructurings & other redistributions of power in offices, corners of farmers' fields & elsewhere. Similarly, the politically-contested frontier between 'the market' & what is imagined to be 'outside the market' constantly shifts as the institutions of 'economics' work at the unfinishable job of creating an 'economy'. A more determined awareness of the processes through which dualisms between intention & world, theory & practice & 'inside' & 'outside' are set up, Lohmann suggests, could help middle-class activism better achieve its goals. Rather than buying into a dichotomous metaphysics by attempting to improve theories that are seen as different in kind from practice, he argues, middle-class activists might become more effective by becoming more self-conscious about the primacy of forming closer working alliances with what he calls 'commoners', whom he sees as being often less prone to imagine political action in terms of such dichotomies. Adapted from the source document.