From economic growth to the human: reviewing the history of development visions over time and moving forward

Abstract

As we face different crises – democratic, social and environmental – there is a need to rethink the assumptions we have made about sustainable development. This paper aims to consider alternatives to development and their fundamental connections to economics. Because discourse is connected to practice, it is important to question definitions. By drawing on existing theories, discourses and practices, I present an economic perspective to accompany post-developmentalist theories and contribute to the collective thinking on alternatives to development. Using the framework of Polanyi, I show that the mainstream view of development, based on a formal definition of economics, has not only failed to address the needs of many but also built a strong imbalance between the Global North and the Global South. A substantive view could be the basis for an alternative to development, relying on the relationship between basic needs, nature and institutions. Profound transformations are needed to balance the economy, society and the environment. To achieve these transformations, alternatives to development must involve rethinking structures, re-embedding the economy and considering the power of collectives and the multiplicity of ideas across the world.

Keywords:

• Development
• substantivism
• economics
• capitalism
• values
• voice

Introduction

Many interconnected crises are occurring in our current world: COVID-19, the climate emergency and the debt crisis, among others. These crises are leading to more and more criticism of our models of development, in the Global North and the Global South. We must rethink the models we have known for so long. Drawing on this situation, the present paper is focused on the notion of development in the Global South and its implications. Traditional development theories have failed to address the needs of many. While more and more development organisations claim that we need to listen to the voices of everyone and allow everyone to participate, many of these organisations still have one-size-fits-all programmes, and participation is much more passive than active. Development implies a path from a certain state to a desired state. But what should we desire? And what path should we take to those desires?

Following the perspective of post-development theories, this paper focuses on alternatives to development with an economic perspective. The relationship between development and economics, and the ambiguity between the two fields, are central characteristics of discourse and practice in the development field. These characteristics may also help us question the assumptions of the field of mainstream economics itself. I work with a meta-narrative review, exploring and confronting different visions of development across history. In the following section, I detail the existing literature questioning the notion of development, mainly from a post-developmentalist perspective, and go further by explaining how a Polanyian framework may contribute to redefining development from an economics perspective. Based on this framework, I first review what I call the Western formal idea of development. This domination from a certain vision of development, centred on a deterministic approach of economic growth, results from a combination of power, money and knowledge, still owned by the former colonisers. The next section is aimed at re-discovering economists and thinkers from the Global North and the Global South, searching for bridges and common topics in their thoughts to highlight what could have been a different vision of development based on substantivism. I finally refine this vision by studying different past and present movements in the Global South, articulating a top-down and a bottom-up approach.

Following a Polanyian definition of economics, I explain how refining the interaction of needs, relationship with nature, and institutions could support this alternative view of development. This is a matter of structures from a Marxian perspective, but we must consider the heterogeneity inside these structures. These considerations would help us understand where we are and where we can go from here. This paper thus aims not to develop new ideas on the matter, but, on the contrary, to draw on existing theories, discourses and practices, articulating the numerous but largely unheard views of authors and movements on the concept of development itself. It is not about denying universal aspirations of equality or sustainability. However, we have to reconsider the borders that have been created artificially between developed and developing countries and the need to articulate so many voices to establish a coherent field as a counter-power to mainstream ideas.

A Polanyian framework to carry on the perspectives of post-development

If many authors have criticised the way development has been done, a specific movement, anti- or post-development, has focused on challenging the notion of development itself (McGregor 2007). It is not an easy position to hold. The legitimisation of development since the Second World War has been a moral one, as the goal is to fight against under-development and poverty, justifying development aid and development theories (Ahorro 2008; Lautier 2001).

Drawing on Foucault and the poststructuralist school, post-developmentalists aim to reintegrate power and political aspects into a concept that is thought to be neutral and practical (Alvares 1992; Escobar 1995; Seabrook 1994). Post-development theorists state that the concept of development entails the dependency of developing countries on the Western world and, through this process, consolidating the power of modernising elites at the expense of many local communities (Rapley 2004). They claim that changing or re-orienting development is not desirable, in any case, as the core assumptions and ideas of the mainstream view of development are the problem (Matthews 2004), which is in line with many other thinkers, practitioners and activists across the world and history.

The interest of post-developmentalists, therefore, is first in alternatives to development and not in development alternatives. This approach has been an important criticism of post-developmentalism (Ahorro 2008). However, alternatives to development are central. Discourse is not a separate sphere; it is fundamentally related to practice. Changing the discourse is thus the first step in changing practices. The dominant views of development have ‘shaped indelibly the ways in which reality is imagined and acted upon’ (Escobar 1995, 5), accepting development as an economic solution. Considering the strong connection between economics and development in the discourse and the corresponding practices, this questioning is important not only for development but for the economics discipline itself. This paper aims to explore the diversity of voices that may help reconsider the notion of development and the basic definitions of the economics discipline, continuing the perspective of post-developmentalism.

Outside post-development theory, other scholars in economics, political economy and other social sciences have worked on related issues across the world. However, their ideas are still fragmented. Considering all these authors, the question becomes how to translate such ideas challenging the concept of development into the economic discipline. ‘How to work collectively to deepen and sharpen collective critiques of capitalist globalisation while imagining and theorising planetary justice?’ (Asher and Wainwright 2019, 37). Furthermore, the concrete practices and voices on the ground must be considered in order to co-construct knowledge and discourses, and from that, practices.

With this goal, to focus on an alternative view of development in relation to the economic discipline, I am using the framework of substantivism from Polanyi (1944 [2001], 1977). I will argue that mainstream development, led by Western countries since decolonisation, is fitting with mainstream economics and the formal definition of economics. This formal definition refers to the logic of rational action and decision-making considering the alternative uses of limited (scarce) means. Here, economics comes first and is separated, or de-embedded, using Polanyi’s terms, from the other spheres of human life (eg society, politics, culture). However, development could be plural, diverse and related to the other definition of economics qualified by Polanyi as the substantive one. This definition refers to how humans develop a society’s livelihood strategy, interacting with their social and natural environments. It may be through maximisation but also other processes. Economics is the way society meets constructed material needs. In this second definition, economics is embedded in societal dimensions. Polanyi thus opposed a ‘market–scarcity–rationality’ triad with the formal definition and instead proposed a ‘nature–need–institution’ triad with the substantive definition.

The triad of nature, needs and institutions could add significantly to structuring the diversity of ideas and practices we can find in the Global South, as in the post-development field. Completely opposing the two definitions would not make sense, since the border between the two can be porous (Spash 2019). However, mobilising only the formal definition establishes the substitutive nature of other forms of economic organisation in the event that markets fail. The substantive definition can then reverse the direction, bringing different ways of organising the economy depending on societal characteristics. This substantive view would also make it possible to question notions that are no longer questioned, such as scarcity. Articulating this substantive perspective with that of other important authors and grassroots movements could allow us to go further and clarify such a theoretical framework. In this journey, it is a matter of breaking with the naturalism of both definitions (Postel and Sobel 2008). I take the confrontation of the two definitions as a base: it is not about taking them literally but about drawing from them. It is about articulating older and newer voices from the Global North and the Global South, finding common ground on which an alternative to development can be built and reflecting on the assumptions of the economic discipline itself.

The formal vision of development: economic growth first and foremost

The term development has often been confused with the following definition: ‘economic growth as measured solely in terms of annual increases in per-capita income or gross national product, regardless of its distribution and the degree of people’s participation in effective growth’ (Abuiyada 2018, 115). The classification of countries themselves, based on gross national income per capita, for the World Bank or on the status of markets, for the International Monetary Fund, is dividing the world, establishing goals to achieve to become developed. This section is structured around two different periods. The first theories of development, from decolonisation to structural adjustment, have progressively built the centrality of the Western conception of development. A second period, resulting from the failure of the Washington Consensus, marked the inclusion of social and institutional aspects in mainstream development. However, international financial institutions have used these dimensions not to change the vision itself of what development should be, but to re-legitimate past views.

From catching up to the Washington Consensus: building a Western conception of development

Since decolonisation, mainstream development has been focused on catching up on Western economic history, economic growth being synonymous with progress and more advanced civilisations. In modernisation theory, conceiving development as an imitative process, developing countries were to acquire the qualities of industrial nations by going through stages of growth until they became self-sustainable, as with Rostow’s theory of five stages of growth (Rostow 1960). For modernisation theory, the dualistic developing economies would comprise a modern sector (capitalist economy), which is the goal, and a traditional sector (subsistence economy; Lewis 1954). Thus, after decolonisation, development logic was linked to a national capitalist mode of production, itself included in globalised capitalism (Amin 1973).

Through the 1970s, global interdependence theories became more important as they tried to solve the growing problem of underdevelopment. This evolution resulted in massive transfers of financial resources to the Global South through Western commercial banks and bilateral and international lending institutions. But rather than leading to a more balanced style of development, these transfers led to the debt crisis and the growing domination of international financial institutions (Abuiyada 2018). The Washington Consensus in the 1980s and the resulting structural adjustments, with liberalisation, privatisation and stabilisation policies, have had devastating effects. The overarching idea was the promotion of market mechanisms in the regulation of most of the domains of economic life. The goals were previously to industrialise these countries to catch up with Western systems. From this point, it was a question of getting as close as possible to the market ideal, to pull developing countries towards growth. Society became an auxiliary of the economy, with the belief that economic growth is a necessary and sufficient condition for improving standards of living (El Aoufi 2009).

While constructing this formal Western vision of development, it became clear that underdevelopment and development can be considered two sides of the same reality: the accumulation of capital on a world scale, based on unequal exchanges. In this scheme, the era of abundance and mass consumption would free humans from natural constraints and constitute the ultimate point in the evolution of societies. Development was fully assimilated to growth, a repetitive phenomenon of universal validity, and underdevelopment to traditionality (Amin 1973).

For dependency theory, this imbalance in international trade was a result of the modernisation approach and growth theories of European and North American countries, which kept countries underdeveloped (Burkey 1993). This situation has continued because the centres (Western economies) were favoured by trade policies, by the balance of economic and political power, and by the control of finance and technology, which also resulted in inequalities between urban and rural areas in the periphery, the Global South (Lipietz 1985). The imbalance resulted in a tendency to develop export crops to the detriment of food crops, leading to the risk of famine (Amin 1973), and the domination of rentier-type economic regimes based on colonial heritages (Hugon 2013). Underdevelopment is thus the consequence of the disarticulation resulting from the adjustment of the orientation of production under the needs of the centre, as shown by dependency theory, the school of regulation or post-developmentalist theorists (Amin 1973; El Aoufi 2009; Rapley 2004). Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney defined underdevelopment as the comparative advantage of one group of nations over another, being ‘a product of capitalist, imperialist and colonialist exploitation’ (Rodney 1972, 14).

Inclusion of institutions as a way to re-legitimate the supremacy of the formal vision

In the 1990s, under the aegis of United Nations bodies, the discourse of international financial institutions evolved towards a growing consideration of the social consequences of structural adjustment. However, if the form of development policies has changed, the substance has remained the same. The inclusion of new political and social dimensions is done to justify the failures of the past. But it is not done to rectify the unequal global structure, as the blame falls on the countries of the Global South themselves, with the growing idea of bad and good governance. Barber B. Conable, President of the World Bank, introduced this concept of good governance in a report on sub-Saharan Africa, saying: ‘A root cause of weak economic performance in the past has been the failure of public institutions’ (World Bank 1989, xii). International financial institutions have thus begun to integrate institutions into development policies. New institutional economics has become more important in mainstream development theories, which now apply contractual analysis (transaction costs, agent relationship …) to the theory of long-term growth. Institutions are envisioned as tools that may increase or hinder economic performance. The economic efficiency criterion is, in this perspective, the determining factor for selecting institutions, leading to long-term convergence of institutional configurations. Economic determinism has evolved into institutional determinism (Dutraive 2009).

Consequently, the dominant assumption is that the economic performance of nations is mainly due to good governance and domestic policies, strong best institutions and the adhesion to free markets. Political criteria were added to the economic conditions of the loans granted by the World Bank, disseminating neoclassical ideological determinants through the progressively performative indicator of good governance (Eboko et al. 2015; Lafaye de Micheaux, Mulot, and Ould-Ahmed 2007). Good governance is understood as a ‘reformer common sense that will adapt to national histories and configurations’ (Batifoulier 2008, 52). This evolution did not call into question the macroeconomic considerations of structural adjustment. On the contrary, they have allowed the World Bank to consolidate its control over the development policies of Southern countries by introducing new conditions (Diop 2016).

The unequal global structure thus remains. Economic growth in the Global North still relies on continuous patterns of colonisation (Hickel, Sullivan, and Zoomkawala 2021). High-income countries are primarily responsible for the climate breakdown through their exploitation of environmental and labour resources, while the Global South is suffering from the consequences of this situation. If countries in the Global North are striving for green growth, the quick shift to renewable energies that is needed to achieve it also requires enormous material extraction in the Global South. It also facilitates unequal structures inside developing countries. Let us look at the example of Burkina Faso, which inherited from colonial times a rentier economy based on cotton. This rentier economy has persisted to the present day, combining the interests of domestic and international elites. Following the end of the revolutionary period (in the 1980s) and the reopening of the country, the government led by Blaise Compaoré developed marketing techniques to perpetuate and maximise its rent. The openness to the international market, made possible by good growth figures and a close relationship between the government and its technical and financial partners, actually allows for an exacerbation of rentier tendencies and the creation of new forms of clientelism (Alenda and Robert 2018).

The limits of the formal development paradigm

Overall, the Western vision relies on a core idea: the centrality of economic growth as conceived in the Global North. To achieve this goal, developing countries are forced to follow a path that is also leading to unequal structures and constant pressure on the planet’s boundaries. The economic growth in the Global North has been sustained by this core idea, the game being biased from the onset. We are thus now seeing the limits of what we can call a mechanistic development paradigm, following economic automatisms. In line with what Polanyi explained (1944 [2001]), this formal paradigm isolates the economy and postulates it as the determining factor in the evolution of societies, limiting the possibilities for alternative visions. The development agenda, in terms of theories, concepts, expertise, institutions and projects, among other things, is resulting in a transposition of this Western vision everywhere (Zaoual 2006). The elites of the world believe that only the technology of the Global North can lead developing nations to become developed. However, as stated by thinkers (such as Rosa Luxembourg; Pattnayak 2004), dependency authors (Amin 1973), degrowth authors (Hickel, Sullivan, and Zoomkawala 2021) and post-developmentalist authors (Escobar 1995), and overlooked by these elites, capitalist expansion requires that developing countries provide the markets supporting capitalist growth. Thus, this expansion leaves developing countries in a state of non- or pre-capitalism; ‘it can never be a vision for the whole world’ (Pattnayak 2004, 671). Authors such as Lin (2011) have stressed the need to consider structural differences leading to different institutions and policies.

Since the Second World War, economists have sought to understand non-capitalist societies from a Western perspective. Underdevelopment was perceived as a chronological delay in relation to developed Western societies. Overall, this formal Western vision of development is linked in its core to mainstream economics, striving for positivism, generalisation and abstraction (Wilber and Francis 1986). From this point of view, development means an increase in the size of the economy by producing more products and services, leading to a higher standard of living for citizens (Dübgen 2012). But the Western vision does not consider the fundamental economic processes involved, such as the fact that more production means increasing the use of raw materials or energy, while it does not solve systemic inequalities. The formal model is by definition non-reproducible on the scale of other societies on the planet (Hugon 2013). As stated by Lin (2011, 214), the debates in the field of development economics as the impact of global crises on developing economies ‘have generated strong demand for a new framework for development thinking’.

An alternative view based on substantivism

The development paradigm could have been different, in line with the substantive vision of Polanyi, which considers humans as subjects, focuses on their relationship with their environment, and makes use of a plurality of possibilities for development rather than a deterministic one. This section looks at converging topics supporting the substantive vision, connecting different thinkers from across the world from the early twentieth century to the period of the first structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s, when the idea of development was still in construction. I do not claim to be exhaustive in the review of authors I consider in this section. I do acknowledge their diversity and importance concerning the matter, however, and their joint criticism of the domination of neoclassical economics and neoliberal politics that are parts of the formal Western vision of development. Because they contradict mainstream ideas, these authors have been historically rejected as too Marxist, too socialist or not ‘economic’ enough. The framework I develop is based principally on the thoughts of Austro-Hungarian heterodox economist Karl Polanyi, who is still influential in the social economy and anti-globalist movements; French political economist François Perroux, who is important in the French field of development; German political economist Albert O. Hirschman, who worked as a consultant for the World Bank and strongly disagreed with its approach to development; and British economist Dudley Seers, famous for his criticism of growth fetishism in the field of development. These authors are complemented by important thinkers from the Global South, namely Frantz Fanon, born in the French colony of Martinique, an important political philosopher influential in the post-development movements; Samir Amin, an Egyptian-French political scientist and a central author of the dependence theories; and Mahatma Gandhi, well known for his campaign for India’s independence but less so for his views on what development could have been. I will refer to other thinkers as well in the section.

Re-embedding the economy

The substantive definition of economics examines the economy as resulting from social and political aspects, and this is the first point that all the authors studied have in common. Polanyi, in opposition to neoclassical thinking, has been important in explaining the non-universality and temporal vision of markets. According to him, the human is not an atom but a social being dependent on his environment (ie nature and other human beings; Polanyi 1977). Differentiating the two visions of the economy (formal and substantive) allowed Polanyi to overcome what he called the economistic fallacy – that is, the tendency to confuse the human economy with the market economy. Perroux (1981) also considered this conceptualisation of the economy – with its focus on markets, prices, spontaneous equilibriums and utility maximisation, among other things – to be narrow, rendering invisible the non-mercantile phenomena that constitute the very conditions for economic activity (Perroux 1981).

The ideological dimension is also important. The dominant theory assumes that economics is a science of means, not a science of ends, the latter being the exclusive expertise of morality and politics. But such a position is not tenable. Indeed, it is impossible to study means independently of the ends they reveal, just as, conversely, one cannot imagine a discipline of ends that would neglect the conditions of their realisation. Moreover, the dominant theory presents the existing social order as fixed and static when it is profoundly dynamic and diverse (Perroux 1973). The abstract concept of scarcity is an interesting illustration. In mainstream economics, it is designated in a supposedly neutral way that the quantities of available resources are fewer than the demands to be satisfied. It leads to putting essential physiological needs and the most immaterial aspirations on the same level, as Perroux and Polanyi have shown. For them, on the contrary, there is a process between natural scarcity and social scarcity – that is to say, scarcity in which inequalities between people play a significant role (Perroux 1981). The same process is found with the concept of growth. Such an aggregate, assumed to be homogeneous by construction, can in no way make it possible to answer questions as essential as those concerning the economic or social objectives of growth.

To sum up, all authors studied here agree that economic development should be redefined as a human economy, going beyond the confrontation between the individual and the whole. This human economy is also far from the individualistic character of the formal Western view of development as seen in neoclassical economics, insisting on community and collective learning (Fanon 1963 [2005]; Polanyi 1944 [2001]). Neoliberal thought has not only separated the individual from the social whole in which he is immersed, but also denied the possibility of economic choices that are not individual, leading to many reductionisms, such as the elimination of power, the homogenisation of agents, the indistinction of needs and the opacity of the notion of growth (Perroux 1981). The re-integration of the economy into social, cultural and symbolic institutional forms is thus a common perspective. It needs to review the notion of scarcity, however, by removing from the economics discipline the pretension of constituting an all-encompassing reading of human action and by giving back its social dimension.

A diversity of patterns against universal laws

Another shared idea among the reviewed authors is that the universal aspect of formal development theories is wrong and has many consequences. Amin (1973) and Fanon (1963 [2005]) insisted on the heavily biased (neo)colonial process. Fanon (1963 [2005]) was highly critical of Europe’s growthist model, seeing it as an imitation of the white capitalistic models from the Global North that profoundly disturbed social structures in the Global South by installing a racial view of the coloniser and the colonised, translated now into the developer and the developing. This view is related to Polanyi’s fictitious commodities (Polanyi 1944 [2001]), which are labour, land and money. According to Polanyi, these items have become homogeneous units governed by market prices, far from the distinctive values they held under diverse thinking in a historical context. Gandhi (1965) shared this perception of a multiplicity of value behind such resources, advocating for a simpler life and a simpler way to develop than the one we have known in the Global North, especially as Western growth has depended heavily on plundering the Global South.

For post-developmentalists, such as Escobar (1995), the problem with development is indeed that it is external and based on a single path following the industrialisation of the Global North. For Seers (1963), development has been pursued through the assumptions of neoclassical economics, which are faulty as they universalise views from the West’s experience. One of the main challenges of development is to avoid copying the experiences of other agents and learn lessons from their errors. Hirschman also insisted that it is not possible to follow the development path that European and North American countries have taken. He attempted to establish a qualitative approach to project appraisal based on detailed historical reconstruction and the understanding of political and social contexts (Alacevich 2016). He also showed that an event or action is explained by identifying its place in a pattern that characterises the ongoing processes of change in the whole system (Wilber and Francis 1986).

Further, Polanyi brought to light several principles of economic interaction that result from social rules and lead to plural forms of production and circulation of goods: reciprocity, based on symmetry and mutual obligations; redistribution, based on centrality and common objectives; domestic administration, based on autarky; and markets, based on barter and individual interchangeability. There is no hierarchy in Polanyi’s view, or any required process going from tradition to modernity. Going beyond the strict definition of exchange between divisible and homogeneous neoclassical goods, Perroux understood the economy as ‘a mixture of free and reciprocal transfers of utilities and relationships of power’ (Perroux 1973, translated by the author, 185). The substantive vision can thus be characterised as holistic, systemic and evolutionary. Ki-Zerbo (1964), a Burkinabé historian and one of Africa’s foremost thinkers, stated that development is not something coming from the outside; it is a process emanating from the people themselves.

Rethinking structures

Overall, anti-colonial thought is an important aspect of the substantive vision. The need to bring justice and equality to exploitative regimes is central, as in Gandhi’s vision (Pattnayak 2004). To achieve this objective, Perroux revised the notion of utility by recognising the priority of the human being in the distribution of the wealth produced, and by approaching utility as being opposed neither to the useless nor to the objectively harmful (Perroux 1973). All agree in dividing the notions of development and growth, growth being the sustained increase of the indicator of a dimension, a purely quantitative improvement, whereas development incorporates a combination of mental and social changes (Perroux 1981). Pushing for the accumulation of wealth may lead to harmful consequences, as ‘calamitous side effects in the political realm, from the loss of democratic liberties at the hand of authoritarian, repressive regimes to the wholesale violation of elementary human rights’ (Hirschman 1981, 98–99). Going further, Hirschman insisted on an important aspect neglected by economists: the role of voice. He then established that a unified look at the political-economic system was vital to improving our understanding of development (Hirschman 1970). Overall, it is the idea of focusing on well-being and not wealth when thinking about the structures of development.

Different views of social justice are also related to social structures and the fact that development has to be thought of in structural, temporal and political ways (Amin 1973). For Fanon (1963 [2005]), the importance of economic models that perpetuate the exploitation of Africa at the expense of Africans highlighted the need to rethink the conditions of production and distribution of local wealth to stem the haemorrhage of resources and brains. The link with the exhaustion of natural resources was already present in such thoughts. Two Indian economists, Tagore in the 1920s and Kumarappa in the 1930s, talked about the exhaustion of materials as well as of humanity coming from overgrowing efforts of production and advocated for small-scale economies opposing the growing industrial economies around the world (Gerber and Raina 2018). Spivak’s work also adds an important aspect (Asher and Wainwright 2019). With her focus on subaltern social groups, she intended to avoid what she characterised as utopian politics and insisted on the idea of resistance. There is a need to build institutional infrastructures validating this resistance, giving a voice and a representation of the subalterns that does not exist in the current system. It is thus also about avoiding biased representation of communities and indigenous societies by applying a Western lens to this representation.

From this perspective, freedom is a concept that repeats in the authors reviewed.¹ Perroux (1973) added a final fundamental characteristic to his vision of the economy, with the costs of man to be integrated into private and social accounting and the underlying requirement to preserve the life and freedom of each human being. The purpose of emancipation and empowerment is not to get access to markets; it is to activate all humans to reflect on their human condition and to rethink structures themselves. These structures have been developed unequally between cities and elites who have followed the Western vision and benefitted from it, and the rural areas and communities that have been undermined and lack the infrastructural resources that would support them in having better lives (Fanon 1963 [2005]). We can find this idea in the post-development stream, arguing that the development process undermines or destroys the diversity of social, cultural, economic and political systems (Kothari 1988). Seers (1983) agreed, stating that the international economic order supported the national elites in perpetuating the subjugation of the poor. Overall, for all the authors I studied in the present section, the goal of economic life should be freedom and justice.

Past and present movements and their articulation within the substantive view

In this section, I articulate the theories with concrete experiences around the world, as more and more voices are raised and need to be heard, in order to build alternative discourses for development. The chosen indigenous and grassroots movements and philosophies cover past and present experiences across the world, clearly criticising the formal Western view of development. Though not exhaustive, they represent important and influential voices that are progressively being translated into the social sciences. I will thus refer to the thoughts of two leaders of past political revolutionary-based movements: Amílcar Cabral, who led the nationalist movement in Guinea-Bissau and the fight for independence; and Thomas Sankara, who became president of the newly named Burkina Faso in 1983 after a coup. In terms of indigenous and grassroots movements, I will cover three main perspectives: Buen Vivir, a very influential movement in South America; the philosophical insights of Ubuntu, used by environmentalists and civil society in Africa; and Ecological Swaraj, a movement resulting from grassroots experiences in India. As in the previous sections, some other movements will be referred to, such as the Green Belt movement in Kenya, established in 1977 and funded by political activist and recipient of the Nobel Peace prize Wangari Maathai. The section is structured according to the assumptions that emerged in the previous section to refine them from grassroots perspectives.

Re-embedding the economy through cultural aspects and self-governance

The main idea of many activist movements in the Global South is participatory development through the respect of traditional forms of self-governance. In 2004, Fall et al., in establishing a typology of different development ideologies, explained the possibility of a democratic partnership approach consisting of an internal development connecting the social and the economic with citizens as collective actors. It is therefore a question of going beyond the state/market duality, which neglects the principle of reciprocity. References to tradition and cultural heritage in the reviewed movements can be found in all of them, supporting self-identity, self-confidence and self-respect to empower individuals and communities (Maathai 1995). Different ways to organise societies and decision-making also come from this heritage. Moreover, Sankara has developed the idea of a self-centred or endogenous development (Harsch 2013). This idea was based on the mobilisation of internal social forces and resources and using the accumulated knowledge and experiences of the people of a country, which is in line with post-developmentalist theorists advocating for more endogenous discourses (Escobar 1995).

The need to improve participation is also echoed in the evolution of development programmes and international agreements. More and more programmes include what are known as safeguard protocols, which have the goal of protecting vulnerable communities from power imbalances. However, the safeguards regime has been accused of unipolar multilateralism and geopolitical dominance of the West (Dann and Riegner 2019). Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) projects insist on participative governance, when, in reality, participation is still passive (Bayrak and Marafa 2016). To convince indigenous communities to get involved in such programmes, the idea is to financially reward them to sustain forests. However, putting a price on forests has been met with strong resistance around the world. It culminated when Evo Morales decided some years ago to stop any REDD programme on Bolivia’s land, claiming these projects were violating the sovereignty of the people and the rights of nature. Moreover, customary laws are often strong in different places of the world. On the African continent, traditional thought processes are still very present, but they are evolving according to the significant impregnation of neoliberal ideas, privatisation and the commodification of land supported by international organisations (Chimhowu 2019). These examples illustrate the neglect of local values and norms and the need for more procedural (inclusiveness of all in decision-making) and distributive (allocation of burdens and benefits regarding the livelihoods of communities; Walker 2012) justice.

Overall, these views give a central place to the human, in line with the substantive perspective but adding an important cultural aspect to it. The Guinean agronomist and politician Cabral centred his thought on people (Neves 2017). Cabral’s understanding of people displayed an identity that is at once cultural and political as well as ethnic and civil, making people depositaries of national traditions as citizens of nations. While economics generally considers culture in relation to different economic outcomes (Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales 2006), culture in the movements I studied occupies a more central place that is needed to liberate it from domination and imperialism. Further, and in line with post-developmentalist theories, culture is not a static set of norms but a social construct that binds societies together while constantly changing and evolving.

A diversity of patterns based on different relationships among nature, needs and institutions

The triad of nature, needs and institutions arising from the substantive view should not lead to other forms of generalisation or naturalism. The multiple relationships between the three elements lead to a diversity of possible institutional models that emphasise human beings’ freedom and creativity in their relationship with the environment. For this diversification to take place, a strong contextualisation is necessary. Cabral (Chabal 1981) conceived theories as an analysis of realities, rarely taking up subjects that were not of direct relevance to the situation in Guinea. In indigenous communities, the vision itself of the group is fundamental, far from the individualistic approaches of Western countries (Börzel and Risse 2016). The movements I reviewed have shown that the organisation of international markets often legitimises the marginalisation of local community-based initiatives, which impacts social relationships as well as the environment that communities depend upon (Harper-Shipman 2019).

Ubuntu is an important illustration of this thought. The word Ubuntu is derived from a Nguni aphorism that can be translated as ‘a person is a person because of or through others’ (Blankenberg 1999, 43) and is based on certain characteristics: ‘compassion, reciprocity, dignity, humanity and mutuality in the interests of building and maintaining communities with justice and mutual caring’ (Khomba, Vermaak, and Gouws 2011, 49). It was in this philosophical spirit that attempts to introduce African forms of socialism were undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s (McDonald 2010). Buen Vivir, which has inspired social movements and scholars in South America, is perhaps the most famous alternative view of development. It owes its political philosophy not only to Western critiques of capitalism but to indigenous worldviews. Buen Vivir is centred on the idea of the well-being of individuals in the social context of their community and in unique environmental situations (Gudynas 2011). Both Buen Vivir and Ubuntu also advocate for small-scale organisations, production and agriculture.

Additionally, exchanges and production are often organised according to reciprocity, social obligations and symbolic values rather than standard neoclassical theory (Tsafack Nanfosso 2007). ‘I receive, therefore I exist. I give, therefore I am respected’ (Enda Graf Sahel 1994, translated by the author, 56). There is thus an important plurality of values, relationships and ways to organise societies. According to Cameroonian philosopher Bidima (2015), the notion of development and its formal discourses led to ‘waging war on "what is not useful" for the benefit of a rationality that does nothing but calculates’ (translated by the author, 381). Everything judged as useless to markets was then sacrificed: the subject was stripped of his cultural references, going from an economy of production to an economy of consumption, which generated frustration. Bidima has been working on the idea of traversée (crossing), involving the need to detect and reveal the multiplicity and diversity of societies, values, religions and cultures. Ubuntu, Buen Vivir and Ecological Swaraj agree with the need to re-embed political and economic boundaries with ecological and cultural continuity and diversity.

Rethinking structures from the international to the individual level

The final commonality between all the reviewed movements is the need to rethink structures to achieve well-being. As put by Ramphele (2020, para. 4), a prominent voice in the rise of Ubuntu as a development model, the formal development models brought us to a multiplicity of crises – climatic, political, social, economic – leading to the ‘need to transform our economic and social relationships to build an inclusive, prosperous democracy in which well-being for all people and the planet are sustainably promoted’. However, achieving this path requires questioning the structures at all levels. For Maathai (Speech at the 4th UN World Women’s Conference, 1995, para. 18), ‘Africa suffered [a] lack of visionary and altruistic leaders committed to the welfare of their own people’ as they were ‘persuaded to accept the development model of the West’. The imbalance between the African elites and the rest of the population remains today, resulting, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, in conflicts, the collapse of nations, and the continuous defiance of politicians and civil servants.

Reconsidering structures also requires reconsidering all the levels at which they intersect, including gender. Many voices are absent in the formal vision of development, but at many levels, women provide the main ones. Approaches such as intersectionality would contribute to this criticism, perspectives on global development and the multiplicity of situations across the world by analysing the consequences of enforcing different hierarchical social divisions (Ryder and Boone 2019). These perspectives echo the work of thinkers such as Fanon and, more generally, post-colonial theories. Feminism itself may entail different perceptions around the world that differ from the Western liberal definition of feminism, which focuses on empowerment, voting rights and individual ownership rights (Larson et al. 2018). Education is also impacted by such ideas. For Gudynas (2011) and Buen Vivir, education programmes should not be considered as forms of investment in human capital. They should be designed so that people become more enlightened.

Overall, Ubuntu and Buen Vivir are in opposition to the strict Western individualist view of rights; they promote collective rights – those of people, communities and nature. Proponents of Ecological Swaraj advocate putting collectives and communities at the centre of governance and the economy through relationships from grassroots democratic units to larger institutions of governance, encompassing a holistic vision of human well-being through physical, material, socio-cultural, intellectual and spiritual dimensions (Kothari, Demaria, and Acosta 2014). The social and solidarity economy developing throughout the world is a representation of the combination of economic, democratic and identity-based dimensions (Defalvard 2013). When the formal reading of the economy becomes universal, every citizen is ultimately reduced to a consumer, causing democracy to lose its meaning. Encouraging forms and spaces of democracy would make it possible to consider the economy in a pluralistic way and to empower human beings to be part of decision-making.

Conclusion and perspectives

The Stockholm Statement, in 2016, assumed that gross domestic product (GDP) growth is not an end in itself and that there is a need to balance the market, state and community. But to realise this goal, we also need profound transformations. Understanding how imperialist relations have historically shaped the possibilities for development in the Global South helps to explain the limits of this development today and strongly echoes the numerous contemporary challenges we encounter. While the formal Western view of development has led to unequal structures, to the de-embeddedness of the economy with regard to human and environmental concerns in favour of individualism and universalism, the alternatives are concerned with the opposite: rethinking structures, re-embedding the economy and considering the power of collectives and the multiplicity of thought across the world.

Natural resources, which serve economic growth in the formal Western view, can serve, on the contrary, social relations in the substantive one. Resources are not merely assets to be used, but markers of relationships and historical identities. Because of what is at stake, an analysis of equity and justice must figure in every economic development decision. Furthermore, while the formal Western view supports the exploitation of these resources to grow the economy, the substantive view could, on the contrary, advocate for their preservation in order to preserve social and cultural relationships. The relation between needs – such as the basic needs for the freedom to aspire to greater goals, and the relation with nature playing an important role for identities, communities and cultures – is thus the balance that institutions should strive for, refining Polanyi’s triad.

Thus, practices derived from the substantive view of development are not just about reorganising the mode of production and opposing capitalists from the Global North with exploited populations and resources from the Global South (Rist 2002); they are about acknowledging the diversity of norms and situations in diverse economies (Klein and Morreo 2019). Overall, the substantive view of development combines Marxist theories with post-structuralist ones, making connections between the structures and the heterogeneity of groups inside them, acknowledging the diversity of countries and regions around the world against the established dichotomy between regions. The recognition of this diversity has been an important aspect of the second wave of post-developmentalism (Ahorro 2008) and should also be fundamental in furthering the Polanyian triad.

Although more and more scholars and activists are engaging with such ideas and offering concrete propositions, we are still far from achieving a balance among the economy, society and the environment, as long as the structures and the purposes of economic thought remain the same. If the goal of the present paper was to reflect on the discourse itself and alternatives to development, some first perspectives about the barriers of such discourses and practices are presented here. Grassroots organisations and environmental justice movements in the Global South have contributed to expanding a shared vocabulary with academic researchers (Rodríguez-Labajos et al. 2019). There is first a relation with ‘doughnut economics’. As Raworth (2018) has put it, we are all developing countries now, considering that no country meets its people’s essential needs while at the same time respecting the planet’s biophysical boundaries. The substantive view of development may also be related to movements such as degrowth, referring to a holistic political, economic and social concept that moves away from a fixation on GDP numbers and productivism to focus on individual well-being in a healthy environment (Latouche 2007). It may thus be time for the development of a strong countermovement with converging voices.

All these scientific perspectives and grassroots movements that feed possible alternatives to development share an important aspect: collaboration, countering the centrality of competition in the formal Western view of development and the economy. This collaborative aspect is strongly in line with the growing discourses establishing the need for cooperation to fight against climate change or unequal globalisation. It is complementary to the need to rely on different forms of production and exchange through a multi-level type of democracy. The substantive view would require new institutions, new ways to organise production internationally and nationally, and a focus on redistribution at all levels. The production of knowledge would also have to change in this perspective, in education as well as in research (Stein 2021). It is now important to continue to question the fundamental assumptions of economics and development, as well as industrialisation, and to bring together all the voices working on the matter to move from discourse to practices.

Acknowledgements

I thank in particular Thomas Eimer, with whom I have shared long discussions about capitalism and property rights and who motivated me to engage in this work; the members of SASE for their support; and the reviewers, for their interest in this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juliette Alenda-Demoutiez

Juliette Alenda-Demoutiez served as Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Amsterdam after completing her PhD in France. She is now Assistant Professor in the chair of economic theory and policy at the Radboud University. Her areas of expertise include sustainability, governance, institutions, indicators and social economy, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. She co-coordinates the research group ‘Transformative Sustainable Change in Action’ at Radboud Institute for Management Research.

Notes

1 Later on, Amartya Sen also qualified development as freedom, considering capabilities as constituting a human economy and providing the possibility and freedom to all humans, without distinction, to be able to live and flourish, to develop self-esteem and to participate in community life.