Rationalisation, resistance and development practice : a question of authority

Abstract

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 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.