New Development Architecture and Postpolitics in the Global South

The Post-Political and Its Discontents

Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics

edited by Japhy Wilson andErik Swyngedouw

WILSON 9780748682973 PRINT.indd 3 28/05/2014 13:18

For Tim, in return for your Little Red BookFor Arno, Nikolaas, and Eva: the world is yours to make

Japhy Wilson acknowledges the financial support of the Hallsworth Research Fellowship. Erik Swyngedouw acknowledges the financial support of the People Programme (Maria Currie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme; under REAS agreeement No 289374 – ‘ENTITLE’.

© editorial matter and organisation Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw, 2014, 2015© the chapters their several authors, 2014, 2015

Edinburgh University Press LtdThe Tun – Holyrood Road12 (2f) Jackson’s EntryEdinburgh EH8 8PJwww.euppublishing.com

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ISBN 978 0 7486 8297 3 (hardback)ISBN 978 1 4744 0306 1 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 7486 8300 0 (ePub)ISBN 978 0 7486 8298 0 (webready PDF)

The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Published with the support of the Edinburgh University Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.


Contents

Contents

List of Contributors vii

Seeds of Dystopia: Post-Politics and the Return of the Political 1

Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

Part I Spaces of Depoliticisation

1. The Post-Politics of Sustainability Planning: Privatisation and the Demise of Democratic Government 25

Mike Raco

2. The Post-Political and the End of Nature: The Genetically Modified Organism 48

Larry Reynolds and Bronislaw Szerszynski

3. The New Development Architecture and the Post-Political in the Global South 67

Sangeeta Kamat

4. Opening Up the Post-Political Condition: Multiculturalism and the Matrix of Depoliticisation 86

Nicolas Van Puymbroeck and Stijn Oosterlynck

5. The Jouissance of Philanthrocapitalism: Enjoyment as a Post-Political Factor 109

Japhy Wilson

6. Religious Antinomies of Post-Politics 126 Bülent Diken

7. Post-Ecologist Governmentality: Post-Democracy, Post-Politics and the Politics of Unsustainability 146

Ingolfur Blühdorn


vi Contents

Part II Spectres of Radical Politics

8. Insurgent Architects, Radical Cities and the Promise of the Political 169

Erik Swyngedouw

9. The Limits of Post-Politics: Rethinking Radical Social Enterprise 189

Wendy Larner

10. Neither Cosmopolitanism nor Multipolarity: The Political Beyond Global Governmentality 208

Hans-Martin Jaeger

11. Against a Speculative Leftism 229 Alex Loftus

12. Spatialising Politics: Antagonistic Imaginaries of Indignant Squares 244

Maria Kaika and Lazaros Karaliotas

13. After Post-Politics: Occupation and the Return of Communism 261

Jodi Dean

14. The Enigma of Revolt: Militant Politics in a ‘Post-Political’ Age 279

Andy Merrifield

There Is No Alternative 299 Erik Swyngedouw and Japhy Wilson

Index 313


Contributors

Contributors

Ingolfur Blühdorn is Reader in Politics/Political Sociology at the University of Bath. Located at the crossroads of eco-political, demo-cratic and social theory, his work focuses on contemporary ecologi-cal and emancipatory politics. It has informed academic and public debates in Europe, the USA and Australia.

Jodi Dean is the Donald R. Harter ’39 Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is co-editor of the international journal of contemporary theory, Theory & Event. Her books include Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (2009) and The Communist Horizon (2012).

Bülent Diken is Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University. His research topics are social and political philosophy, urbanism, cinema, terror and religion. His books include The Culture of Exception (2005, with C. B. Laustsen); Sociology Through the Projector (2007, with C. B. Laustsen); Nihilism (2009); and Revolt, Revolution, Critique – The Paradox of Society (2012).

Hans-Martin Jaeger is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa. His work on international political theory and sociology, global governance, and international organisations has been published in International Theory, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, International Political Sociology, and other journals.

Maria Kaika is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester, and Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Her research focuses on urban political ecology,


viii Contributors

land rent, land financialisation, urban imaginaries, iconic architec-ture, and European environmental policy. She is author of City of Flows (2005).

Sangeeta Kamat is Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her areas of interest are the sociology and anthropology of development and neoliberalism. Her research is on NGOs and development in a neoliberal context, and more recently in critical geography studies in education.

Lazaros Karaliotas is Research Associate in Urban Studies at the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow. He holds a PhD in Human Geography and an MA in Development Studies from the University of Manchester. His research addresses urban restructuring, processes of post-politicization and post- democratization, radical politics, urban social movements and envi-ronmental politics.

Wendy Larner is Professor of Human Geography and Sociology at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on topics of glo-balisation, neoliberalism, governance and gender. Her most recent book is Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand Design, Working Women and the Cultural Economy (2013, with Maureen Molloy).

Alex Loftus in Senior Lecturer in Geography at King’s College London. He is the author of Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology (2012), and co-editor of Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics (2013).

Andy Merrifield is a writer, social theorist and urban geographer. He is the author of numerous books, including most recently, Magical Marxism (2011), John Berger (2012), The Politics of the Encounter (2013), and The New Urban Question (2014).

Stijn Oosterlynck is Assistant Professor in Urban Sociology at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He is the director of the Center for Inequality, Poverty, Social Exclusion and the City (OASeS). His research focuses on the politics of urban development and commu-nity development, social innovation and welfare state restructuring and solidarity in diversity.

Mike Raco is Professor of Urban Governance and Development in the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. He has published widely on urban governance, sustainability, and the


Contributors ix

politics of urban and regional development. His latest book is State-led Privatisation and the Demise of the Democratic State: Welfare Reform and Localism in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism (2013).

Larry Reynolds is Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. His work develops insights from the historical materialist tra-dition to explore the problematic of socio-technical transition to a post-fossil fuel society. His PhD addressed the socio-technical battle around GM Crops, He has co-authored a series of articles, papers and book chapters on these questions with Bronislaw Szerszynski.

Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at Manchester University. His research interests include political ecology, urban governance, democracy and political power, and the politics of glo-balisation. He was previously Professor of Geography at Oxford University, and held the Vincent Wright Visiting Professorship in Political Science at Science Po, Paris, in 2014.

Bronislaw Szerszynski is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University. He is author of Nature, Technology and the Sacred (2005), and co-editor of Risk, Environment and Modernity (1996), Re-Ordering Nature (2003), Nature Performed (2003) and a special double issue of Theory Culture and Society on ‘Changing Climates’ (2010).

Nicolas Van Puymbroeck is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Antwerp. His PhD research, which is funded by the Flanders Research Foundation, draws on theoretical insights derived from post-foundational political thought to explore the dynamics of urban immigrant integration policies.

Japhy Wilson is Research Coordinator at the National Strategic Centre for the Right to Territory (CENEDET) in Quito, Ecuador. His research explores the relationship between space, power and ideology in the politics of development. He is the author of Jeffrey Sachs: the Strange Case of Dr Shock and Mr Aid (2014).


Seeds of Dystopia: Post-Politics and the Return of the Political

Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

Western democracies are only the political facade of economic power. A facade with colours, banners, and endless debates about sacrosanct democracy. We live in an era where we can discuss everything. With one exception: Democracy. She is there, an acquired dogma. Don’t touch, like a museum display. Elections have become an absurd comedy, shameful, in which the participation of the citizen is very weak, and governments represent the political commissionaires of economic power. There isn’t democracy, only the appearance of democracy. We live in a simulation. If we want real democracy, we will have to create it ourselves.

José Saramago (2006)

In Seeing, the final installment of his magisterial urban trilogy, José Saramago offers an incisive dissection of our current political pre-dicament. A few years after a strange episode of collective blindness, city administrators are preparing for a general election. The great day for the democratic festival is a miserably rainy Sunday, and once all the ballots are counted, it turns out that a large percent-age of people have spoiled their votes. The city elites of the Party of the Left, the Party of the Middle, and the Party of the Right are disquieted, if not alarmed. Something must have gone wrong, these surmise, probably the bad weather . . . A week later, the elections are repeated. This time the weather is better, but the electoral outcome is even worse: 83 per cent of the citizens vote blank. What Saramago calls ‘the simple right not to follow any consensually established opinion’ deeply troubles the city government. One minister refers to it as a conspiracy against the democratic system itself. In its desper-ate attempt to understand what is going on, and to root out what must be an organised subversion against the sacrosanct democratic principle, the government declares ‘a state of emergency’, unleashing all manner of repressive tactics to uncover the masterminding source


2 Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

of the anti-democratic plot. But none can be found. In a final desper-ate attempt to make the city and its citizens come to their senses, the government decides to decamp to another place, leaving the residents to their own devices and anticipating a descent into anarchic catas-trophe. However, nothing of the sort happens. Everyone goes about his or her daily life, and the city continues as normal.

In this allegory, first published in 2004, Saramago ruthlessly sati-rises the disaffection of a growing number of people with the insti-tuted rituals of representative democracy. Thousands of passive rebels refuse to do what is expected of them. They reject the ballot box, and just go on with life as if nothing has happened. With chilling precision, Saramago diagnoses the deadlock of contemporary ‘demo-cratic’ governance. We live in times both haunted and paradoxical. Instituted representational democracy is more widespread than ever; identitarian concerns and all manner of issues and problems are made visible and politicised; ‘participatory’ and ‘inclusive’ forms of governance are nurtured and fostered on a range of geographical scales; and lifestyle preferences, the unsustainable re-engineering of our climate, the sexual escapades of the former IMF chairman, the heroic resistances of indigenous peoples, fracking, the repression of gay people in Russia, the garbage left on the sidewalk, the plight of the whale, the governments’ austerity agendas to get the economy out of the doldrums – all these issues and an infinity of others are politicised in certain ways. That is, they are discussed, dissected, evaluated, raised as issues of public concern and debated at length in a variety of public and political arenas. Everything, so it seems, can be aired, made visible, discussed, and rendered contentious.

In short, democracy as the theatre of and for the pluralistic and disputed consideration of matters of public concern would appear to be triumphant. Political elites, irrespective of their particular party allegiance, do not tire of pointing out the great strides that demo-cratic civic life has made. We are told that the great battle of the twentieth century between totalitarianism and democracy has been finally and decisively concluded in favour of the latter. The history of humanity, marked by heroic-tragic ideological battles between opposing visions of what constitutes a ‘good’ society, has suppos-edly come to an end. Democracy is now firmly and consensually established as the uncontested and rarely examined ideal of institu-tionalised political life. There are of course still ongoing rearguard archaic ideological battles on the geographical and political margins of the civilised world, waged by those who have not yet understood the lie of the land and the new horizon of history. When the need arises, they are corralled by any means necessary into consensual participation in the new global democratic order (although not


3 The New Development Architecture and tThe Post-Political in the Global South

Sangeeta Kamat

Neoliberalism has fundamentally transformed development policy and practice in the Third World. This calls for new conceptual tools that move beyond earlier analyses of depoliticisation, anti-politics, alternative development and post-development. As many commen-tators have pointed out, neoliberalism is more than a set of eco-nomic policies aimed at eliminating trade barriers, promoting foreign investment and hollowing out the nation state. Rather, neoliberalism ‘reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject’ and ‘involves extend-ing and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action’ (Brown 2003, emphasis in original). Drawing on Foucault’s work on governmentality, Wendy Brown (2003) has argued that the distinctiveness of neoliberalism lies in the way democratic princi-ples of freedom, rights and equality are merged so thoroughly with market rationality that an emancipatory politics appears hopeless and unjustified. She claims that neoliberalism cloaks itself in a liberal democratic discourse, while simultaneously dismantling democratic institutions and values. Brown concludes that this use and abuse of democracy confronts the Left with a fundamental paradox in devel-oping an antidote to neoliberalism. While I am in broad agreement with Brown’s analysis, this chapter argues that the analytics of neo-liberal governmentality must be supplemented with a critique of the post-political in order to effectively engage with this paradox.

The chapter draws on empirical work in India to think through the ways in which post-politics is constitutive of the new development architecture in the ‘Global South’. The post-political conjuncture signals a new political formation in which democratic norms and practices have become central to sustaining the ideological complex of neoliberalism. This emphasis on the centrality of ‘democracy’ to neoliberal ideology sets post-political analysis apart from the literature on governmentality, according to which discourses of


68 Sangeeta Kamat

freedom, rights and choice are only a legitimating gesture of pro-market regimes (Brown 2003: 27). The authoritarian capitalist state is assumed to be the ‘real’ face of neoliberalism, and insistence on democratic principles is seen as a mere rhetorical ‘shell’ that is disingenuous and ‘void of substance’ (Brown 2003: 11–15). Most critiques of development similarly argue that ‘democracy promo-tion’ by Western aid agencies is merely an illusion, a smokescreen for predatory capital in its global expansionary phase. World Bank programmes are understood as distorting the true content of democ-racy to promote a ‘market rationality’ of free enterprise and the flexible worker (Rankin 2004; Elyachar 2005). As I illustrate in this chapter, this analysis underestimates the ideological consequences of the democratic surplus and minimises the political fallout of neoliberalism. I argue that democratic discourses of empowerment, inclusion and participatory development are not false gestures but institute a political culture that is indispensable to the neoliberal growth strategy.

The chapter examines the democratic discourse in the context of neoliberal development in India. My claim is that the legacy of state-led development, citizen entitlements, and the persistence of the commons in the postcolony has embedded neoliberal rational-ity and market moralism in a welfare-developmentalist discourse, in contrast to the discrediting and dismantling of welfare programmes in the West. In the postcolony, neoliberal rationality not only pro-motes market values of competitive individualism, but fuses these with democratic norms of participation, community empowerment and inclusion. However, the idealisation of these democratic prin-ciples is at the same time profoundly undemocratic in its disavowal of the politics of poverty and inequality. This duality of embody-ing the democratic ethos while simultaneously repudiating conflict and contradiction is the essence of post-politics. As readers of this volume are already well aware, post-politics refers to a new mode of governance in which antinomies are effectively vanquished and lib-erals and conservatives speak a common language of public-private partnership, civic participation and the promotion of democracy as the path to economic growth and sustainable development. The post-political formation is one in which dissent is not suppressed but made irrelevant, where all concerned parties have a voice and difference is acknowledged, while conflict and oppositional politics are considered redundant (Mouffe 2005; Swyngedouw 2009). Post-political society is therefore also post-democratic, in the sense that democratic norms and the demos are passionately defended while agreement on fundamentals is assumed and consensual politics is expected to prevail (Rancière 2000; Dean 2005; Žižek 2004).


The Post-Political in the Global South 69

In advanced capitalist states in which liberal democracy is hegem-onic, the rise of ‘Third Way politics’ and ‘the new progressivism’ are the hallmarks of post-political society. However, while much of the literature on post-politics relates to advanced capitalist democracies, I argue that the imperatives of global capitalism produce similar tendencies in the ‘Global South’. In the field of international develop-ment, the post-political operates in multiple registers, from global policy formulation to local community interventions, through which the established divisions between public and private, state and market, individual and community are dissolved to form a post-ideological global compact on growth and democracy. The contestations that defined development in the postwar postcolonial period are replaced by a politics of consensus that unites governments and NGOs, com-munities and corporations in a shared vision of development and governance, which operates with impunity in the face of staggering levels of poverty, inequality and dispossession. Established modes of representative government that allow for contentious politics have been replaced by a new ‘art of government’ that relies upon collabo-ration, coordination and integration, in which competing interests are harmonised to propose a ‘win-win’ situation for all (Lemke 2007; Cruikshank 1993; Swygnedouw 2009). In this distinctively post-political framework, interests are seen only in particularistic terms, and are denied their universal content (Žižek 1999).

The first part of the chapter presents an overview of the new development architecture at the global scale, reflected in policy prop-ositions that inaugurate the post-political formation. The second part considers the mainstream appropriation of the ‘alternative develop-ment’ discourse of ‘participation’ and ‘empowerment’, which nulli-fies its political content. The final section reviews a micro-credit and ‘self-help’ programme in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, which embodies the post-political approach. This flagship programme pro-vides a classic instance of the mechanisms through which India’s ‘political society’ (Chatterjee 2011) is made to conform to a post-political governance framework. I conclude that the ideological implications of neoliberal development are best understood through the analytical lens of post-politics.

Development in the neoliberal conjuncture

In a speech in New Delhi in 2012 on ‘The future of international development’, the Permanent Secretary for the UK’s Department for International Development (DFiD) declared ‘We live in a new global order, an order which no longer follows the tired old rules of the


70 Sangeeta Kamat

rich and the poor; the donor and the recipient; the first world and the third’ (Lowcock 2012). Such easy rhetoric is commonplace in an era in which historic antagonisms are said to have been replaced by ‘open societies and open economies’ (Lowcock 2012). References to the ‘new architecture of aid and assistance’ circulate in global policy rhetoric, and are retrofitted as the new enlightened approach to development in the Third World. During my recent research on the NGO sector in Andhra Pradesh, I stumbled upon a particularly com-pelling instance of the ‘new architecture’ at a workshop organised by the Centre for Good Governance for district-level government and NGO staff. The highlight of the workshop was a slide reproduced in Figure 3.1.1

The ‘old framework’ referred to the perspective that supposedly informed state planning in the welfare developmentalist period, and workshop participants were encouraged to consider the new charter as one more conducive to India’s new growth strategy of market liberalisation. The theme song of the ‘new framework’ is that bina-ries are redundant, oppositions constrain progress and a fresh new conceptual approach is needed that rejects boundaries, hierarchies and difference in favour of a new equivalence in social class and geography. In contrast to the authoritarianism and exclusion that characterised the top-down development planning of the past, the new architecture deploys a progressive and democratic orientation by flattening out hierarchies and inequalities and adopting an equal-ising approach – the poor must be provided with the same opportu-nities to become ‘active citizens’ as the rich, and markets must thrive in rural as well as urban areas.

This new paradigm is reflected in ‘good governance’ arrangements that project a unity of interests between multilateral development agencies, First World and Third World governments, multinational corporations, and a diverse NGO sector, all of which are repre-sented as equal stakeholders in the development enterprise (see Raco, Chapter 1 of this volume). More recently, philanthropic foundations

Old Framework New Framework active citizen

rural and urban

rich and poor

seamless market

appropriate technology advanced technology

Figure 3.1 The New Development Architecture


New Development Architecture and Postpolitics in the Global South

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