The contribution of discourse analysis to development studies

Abstract

Reviewing the contribution of discourse analysis in development studies, the paper first engages with the critique of the approach that has been voiced repeatedly. In this regard, it discusses the reproaches of losing sight of materiality, homogenizing different perspectives in development studies, denying the agency of subjects and being unable to provide political alternatives. By using different examples, the paper shows that these points of criticism are no inherent features of discourse analysis in development studies. Proceeding to systematically analyse the contribution of these approaches to the discipline, the paper then outlines six specific features of development discourse: its naturalizations, problematizations, legitimizations, hierarchizations, depoliticizations and appropriations. It concludes that discourse analysis successfully highlights relations of power so far unnoticed and is most convincing when combined with the analysis of institutional necessities and material interests. The contribution of discourse analysis to development studies The research on discourse in development studies is relatively novel. It has (except for a few early starters) emerged during the 1990s (see e.g. Escobar 1985 and 1995; Ferguson 1994; Nederveen Pieterse 1991; Manzo 1991; Sachs 1990 and 1992; Moore/Schmitz 1995; Crush 1995; Apthorpe/Gasper 1996; Cooper/Packard 1997a; Grillo/Stirrat 1997) and has continued to draw attention in the 2000s (Abrahamsen 2000; Biccum 2002 and 2006; Stein 2004; Oommen 2004; Karagiannis 2004; Groves/Hinton 2005; Mosse/Lewis 2005; Eriksson Baaz 2005; Smith 2006; Li 2007; Duffield 2007a and 2014; Greenstein 2009; Griffiths 2010; Cornwall/Eade 2010). However, there were numerous books on the history of development theory and the idea of development in earlier decades (e.g. Alcalde 1987, Arndt 1987, Nisbet 1969) without using the term ‘discourse’ which became popular only in the – often somewhat superficial – reception of the works of Michel Foucault. While a relatively recent article claims that ‘the study of discourses about underdevelopment appears to have been neglected by discourse analysts’ and that ‘analysis that examines dynamics of power through the study of speech, text and images has not broken through into mainstream development studies and remains a marginal field of analysis in critical IDS’ (della Faille 2011: 215f), a closer look casts doubt on this claim. This doubt not only rests on the number of works listed above, but also on their presence in academic debates. While development agencies on the one hand and established scholars in development theory have usually not at all been keen to take these new approaches serious, the quotes in google scholar certainly cannot testify a marginalisation: while both Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty and William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden – two of the best-selling and oft-quoted books in development studies during the last decade – have been quoted a little under 3000 times, Escobar’s Encountering Development has (in February 2015) over 7000 quotes. So, judging from this admittedly narrow evidence, discourse analysis in development studies seems at least to inspire debate. While this strand of research is too vast to be comprehensively paraphrased and evaluated here, this working paper will nevertheless try to deal with the contribution of discourse analysis to development studies. It will do so by 1) summing up and discussing frequent points of criticism towards discourse analysis in development studies, 2) highlighting important points of selected texts of this research and articulating their contribution in the light of this critique and 3) specifying what the preceding chapters have to add to the state of the research. 1 So in this respect, Nederveen Pieterse (2011) is right in rejecting della Faille’s marginalization hypothesis. Yet when he supports his counter-claim that development studies has experienced the linguistic turn and that ‘all critical development scholars use discourse analysis, except for quantitative scholars and empiricists and policy specialists’ (2011: 237), he is excluding three substantial groups plus all ‘non-critical’ scholars – which might together well add up to a majority. Empirical studies of this question may be helpful.

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