Porter, Doug
Description
This thesis examines the relations between theory and practice in development.
The primary concern is to investigate causes and remedies of a tension between
three interests pursued in development, namely: between strategies to achieve
material interests (such as economic productivity) and the realisation of personal
(such as dignity and esteem) and political interests (such as social justice and
liberty). This tension is referred to as the development malaise. Particular attention
is...[Show more] given to how the conduct and commitments of development practitioners
express different forms of rationality and authority. The argument shifts from
practice (five project case studies), to theory (reflection on the project studies) and
back to practice (a final case study). This structure corresponds with three broad
themes.
Aspects of the development malaise have been well researched. But this
literature has reached an impasse: much of it enfeebles rather than enables practical
strategies. The rationalisation perspective - assembled from the work of
Weber, Marcuse and Habermas - provides an historical context and set of propositions
to analyse the development malaise. A distinction between technical and substantive
rationality, and different inflexions on the concept authority, are used to
explore the ways in which the activities of practitioners, including the techniques,
procedures and language they employ, reproduce and sustain the development
malaise in project examples drawn from New Zealand, Fiji, Western Samoa and the
Philippines.
The rationalisation perspective, however, tends to ignore other aspects of
practice which are collectively labelled resistance. Both rationalisation and resistance
must be incorporated into any theoretical perspective which seeks to adequately
understand the development malaise and establish practical strategies to
encounter it. The epistemological and normative issues of incorporating both constitute
the second theme. The theory of structuration, as developed by Giddens,
helps clarify these issues and indicates a path toward their resolution. However,
this second theme maintains that research questions cannot be resolved in theory
and then applied in practice. Non-dualist theories like structuration are hermeneutic
and therefore do not provide a position' in the usual sense of the word. The third theme therefore is that just as the relations between practitioners
and the development malaise are not subject to formulation as a position, structuration
theory provides no algorithm for practical conduct. The notion of responsible
practice, as a theoretically informed method, involves a continual struggle to
reconcile the positive and deleterious aspects of two ethics of practice which reflect two different rationalities and grounds for authority. Furthermore, this reconciliation
requires a suspension of the usual distinction between theory and practice
which deeply affects the conduct and responsibilities of the development practitioner.
Just how this occurs is not amenable to formulation as a series of
precepts; the question is less what responsible practice is, but in what does it inhere.
Items in Open Research are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.