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Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. By Arturo Escobar. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Pp.ix+290. 40/$49.50 and 13.95/$15.95. ISBN 0 69103409 5 and 00102 2
The critique of theories and practices applied by the international development community in Asia, Africa and Latin America has a long history. In the 1960s and the 1970s it went under the broad heading of dependency theory, was expressed in the language of political economy and drew on a variety of combinations of Marxism and structuralist economics. In the 1980s a new approach, less economistic in its expression and more concerned to question the very identification of progress with growth and development, emphasised the fate of women and of the environment and called for an end to the destruction of cultures and livelihoods through grassroots mobilisation. This new style in the critique of development, has been heavily influenced, or conditioned, by the proliferation of NGOs and the growth of resources under their control, by the fashion for new social movements and for the alternative and appropriate, and more broadly by post-modernism. In this context the success of Arturo Escobar's Encountering Development, invites not only extended comment but also a response to the reaction `here we go again - the sixties and seventies are repeating themselves'.
This reaction - not fully justified but not entirely inappropriate either - is based on the retrospective judgment that the previous episode of dissidence in opposition to the dominant development policies of the time - dependency theory - suffered from two major problems: the inability of its advocates to develop their insights into a sustained theory generating research and speculation at various levels and over a sustained period of time, and thus of achieving cumulative results; and the disastrous consequences of the parties and governments inspired by dependentista ideas. Whether or not their failure was precisely a consequence of those ideas, and however much it could be blamed on the injustices of the international system, the experiments in Chile, Nicaragua and Mozambique offer strong support for that argument. The deja vu quality of Escobar's current success signals the fact that while once there was a generation of young students educated in the US but revolted by the Vietnam war, now...