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Abstract
The UN′s Sustainable Development Goals agenda points far into 2030, which shows that its post-war development endeavour is not functioning effectively. This article implements a discourse analysis of the UN Development Programme′s (UNDP) Human Development Reports (HDR) and exposes their internal contradictions. This analysis enables a critical reflection on the UNDP′s political position: its reports conceal the political causes of underdevelopment. By concealing the antagonistic/conflictual dimension of social issues – poverty, inequality, and exclusion – the UNDP naturalises the actual neoliberal order. The HDR turns political problems into technical issues; according to this approach, no power relations have to be changed in order to overcome underdevelopment.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ruth Judge and Tom Kugler for their careful help, and the referees of the journal for their helpful comments. Aslo Karlos Pérez de Armiño (HEGOA Institute, UPV-EHU) and David Howarth (University of Essex) for their indispensable support.
Notes
1. DESA, The Millennium, 5.
2. Browne, The UN Development Programme, 6.
3. McNeill, Human Development, 6.
4. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 13.
5. Howarth, ‘Power, Discourse, and Policy,’ 311–312
6. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 2.
7. Ibid., 96.
8. Howarth, Poststructuralism and After, 10.
9. Jørgensen and Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory, 25.
10. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 106.
11. Ibid., 105.
12. Howarth, Poststructuralism and After, 154.
13. Jørgensen and Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory, 27.
14. Ibid., 24.
15. Mouffe, Agonistics, 130.
16. Ibid., 3.
17. Ibid., 3–4.
18. Mouffe’s proposes assuming the antagonism inherent in social relations and turning it into ‘agonism’.
‘There is a distinction which I take to be crucial for grasping the specificity of modern democratic politics: the distinction between antagonism and agonism. A relation of antagonism is one that takes place between enemies, while a relation of agonism takes place between adversaries. (…) I envisage democratic politics as a form of “agonistic pluralism”. This is a way to envisage democracy which, starting with the recognition of power relations and the conflicts that they entail, stresses that in modern democratic politics the crucial problem is how to transform antagonism into agonism. In other words, the aim of democratic institutions from this perspective is not to establish a rational consensus in the public sphere; it is to provide democratic channels of expression for the forms of conflicts considered as legitimate.’ (Mouffe, The Radical Centre, 16–17).
19. Mouffe, The Radical Centre, 13.
20. Mouffe, Agonistics, 131.
21. Mouffe, On the Political, 10.
22. Ibid., 3
23. Buzzwords come and go in development theory and practice (Cornwall and Brock, “What Do Buzzwords Do”). Also, discursive structures adapt to changes in the context (Ziai, Development Discourse). In order to demonstrate that the contradiction we will show in the UNDP’s discourse has remained unaltered since 1990, our research will pay special attention to the first reports (early 1990s) and to the last ones (2010s).
24. UNDP, HDR 1990.
25. Telleria, ‘Los dos discursos.’
26. For a further analysis of the UNDP’s discursive drift into a purely economistic perspective of people and development, see Cammack, “The UNDP.”
27. Amartya Sen’s book Inequality Reexamined is especially interesting when trying to analyse this author’s influence over the Human Development framework. The text draws on Sen’s lectures from 1986, 1988, and 1989 (Sen, Inequality Reexamined, xii), and was published for the first time in 1992. This means that it shows Sen’s thought in the period he worked with Mahbub ul Haq in the theoretical design of the human development paradigm (Haq, ‘Human Development Index’).
28. Sen, Inequality Reexamined, 31–38.
29. Rawls, A Theory of Justice.
30. Griffin and Knight, ‘Human Development,’ 10; Sen, ‘Development as Capability Expansion,’ 46–49; Streeten, First Things First.
31. Sen, Inequality Reexamined, 26–30.
32. Sen, Development as Freedom, 3.
33. Our analysis will focus on the UNDP’s proposals. For a similar analysis focused on Sen’s work see Ziai, Development Discourse, Chapter 12.
34. UNDP, Human Development Reports 1990–2015, 84.
35. Ibid., 10–11.
36. Ibid., 14.
37. Ibid., 10.
38. Ibid., 14
39. Ibid., Chapter 1.
40. Ibid., 28.
41. UNDP, HDR 1996, 66.
42. UNDP, HDR 2013, 25.
43. UNDP, HDR 2014, 57.
44. For a detailed analysis of this instrumental conceptualisation of the human being in the HDR, see Telleria, ‘Los dos discursos’; Telleria, ‘What Does Culture Mean’; Telleria, ‘Desarrollo Humano y Cultura.’
45. UNDP, HDR 1990, 10.
46. UNDP, HDR 2015, 63.
47. In his article entitled ‘Markets and Freedoms: Achievements and Limitations of the Market Mechanism in Promoting Individual Freedoms’, Sen raises his doubts about the adequateness of competition in the distribution of opportunities and freedom. Just as a Pareto efficient outcome may well be thoroughly unequal and nasty, the corresponding weakly efficient combination of opportunity-freedoms can also be deeply unattractive. (Sen, ‘Markets and Freedoms,’ 536)
48. UNDP, HDR 2015, 1.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 84.
51. Ibid., 10.
52. Ibid., 40.
53. Ibid., 84.
54. Ibid., 84.
55. Ibid., 9.
56. Ibid., 9.
57. Ibid., 8.
58. UNDP, HDR 1990, iii.
59. Ziai defines this perspective as a ‘methodological nationalism’ which ‘sees each country as a kind of container unrelated to others’ (Ziai, Development Discourse, 221).
60. Ibid., 78.
61. UNDP, HDR 1992, 1.
62. UNDP, HDR 2015, 152.
63. UNDP, HDR 1990, 3.
64. Ibid., 18.
65. Ibid., 71.
66. UNDP, HDR 2015, 23.
67. UNDP, HDR 1990, 18.
68. Ibid., 35.
69. UNDP, HDR 1991, 80.
70. UNDP, HDR 1992, 51–52.
71. Ibid., 27.
72. Ibid., 48.
73. Ibid., 6.
74. Ibid., 66.
75. UNDP, HDR 2015, 9.
76. UNDP, HDR 1992, 1.
77. UNDP, HDR 2015, 65.
78. Ibid., 1.
79. UNDP, HDR 1992, 1.
80. UNDP, HDR 2014, 9.
81. Nederveen states that the main tension in contemporary development thinking and practice is the rift between the Washington institutions and the human development approach (Nederveen, Development Theory, xiii). In this sense, this rift reproduces the bipolar tension of the Cold War but in an exclusive liberal fashion: extremely liberal vs moderately liberal.
82. Fukuyama, The End of History.
83. Although Fukuyama´s book was published in 1992, it was based on an essay from 1989.
84. UNDP, HDR 1990, iii.
85. Mouffe, Agonistics, 132.
86. Mouffe, The Radical Centre, 18.
87. Ziai, Development Discourse, 179.
88. Browne, The UN Development Programme.
89. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, xiv–xvi.
90. Della Faille, ‘Discourse Analysis,’ 229.
91. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, 256.
92. Hardt and Negri. Empire, 133.