ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses post-development theory and its ambiguous relation to agency. In its radical critique to development, post-development suggests that discourse plays a momentous part in structuring development actors and their practice. This post-structural critique of development analyses development as a powerful discourse that serves to order and regulate the object of development, providing a privileged point of departure to grasp the knowledge system of development and possible explanations to the slowness of practical changes despite regular paradigmatic alterations of development’s theoretical and rhetorical level. Post-development provides an interesting approach to the formal macro level of development, but its application of a Foucault-inspired discourse analysis and the emphasis given to discourses’ formative power raise concerns regarding the notion of actors’ agency internal to and in relation to what is perceived as the development discourse. In their emphasis on development discourse’s power over agency, post-development scholars reduce what was cherished by the post-modern tradition of which post-development is part, that is, individualism and multitude on both an empirical and theoretical level. Post-development’s strict view on agency and development discourse’s formative power over the individual is perhaps best illustrated by the words of James Ferguson who in The Anti-Politics Machine, which belongs to the post-development gospel, writes that
[w]hatever interests may be at work and whatever they may think they are doing, they can only operate through a complex set of social and cultural structures so deeply embedded and so ill-perceived that the outcome may be only a baroque and unrecognisable transformation of the original intention.
(1994: 17)