The Deconstruction of Development : A Critical Overview

Over the past 25 years, the development industry has come under extensive criticism for its track record of achievement (or lack of) in producing a sustained improvement of living conditions in many of the countries that have been recipients of sizeable volumes of development aid. This article looks at one particular angle: the poststructuralist critique of development articulated in development anthropology, building on the acquisition of poststructuralist tools during the postmodern turn in US anthropology, which has permitted critics of development to articulate their dissatisfaction in the idiom of deconstruction. Poststructuralist anthropologists started to apply a Foucauldian analytics to phenomena of development in the mid-1980s, thus mounting a substantial epistemological challenge to development anthropology. The article provides a critical overview of development as a discourse, geneaology, discursive object-making strategies and fictional realities, reviewing the deconstructionist perspective on anthropological participation in development efforts. The article's arguments are explored more extensively in Operation Cooperation