Daniel Speich

german version

Since World War II, a complex system of international technical cooperation and development aid has evolved, which prominently structures knowledge about the North-South-Divide. Countless international organizations owe their very existence to this field of expertise. The “Development Machine” (James Ferguson) has become a powerful element within the socio-economic reality of almost all recipient countries. And its fundraising activities have strongly influenced the public image of the Third World on the donor side. The project suggests understanding the aid industry as a new global culture, within which forms of knowledge play a key role as agents of coherence.

Initially, the postcolonial practice of development aid was shaped by the western model of a Keynesian welfare state and conceptualized as a strategic element in the Cold War. Necessary conditions were an unrestricted trust in science and technology, a strong state, a stable and clearly regulated international economic order and the assumption, that socio-economic change can be planned, induced and controlled. By the 1970s most of these conditions were seriously called into question. But surprisingly enough, the business of development aid gained further momentum. Net aid flows still rose in the 1980s, even though it became more and more evident, that the whole endeavour basically missed its objective. Meanwhile, questions concerning low aid efficiency and the failure of development schemes have become major topics in a booming discipline.

The project explains this persistence in terms of a cultural analysis. It suggests three case studies concerning the role of scientific and technical knowledge in the perception of socioeconomic change. Areas of study are an international organization (UNDP), a recipient country (Kenya) and one donor context (Switzerland). Since the 1950s, concepts of change in these three spheres of social reality gradually merged into the term “development”, thus giving rise to a global frame of reference, shared by experts in metropolitan headquarters as well as project participants in the field. Over the last five decades, the international development discourse has been an important source of situative cultural identity for donors as well as recipients. A cosmopolitan culture has resulted, which can be called a “new tribe” (Ulf Hannerz). While its material existence is secured by politically, economically or morally motivated aid flows, the cultural mode of existence of this postcolonial culture of development is defined by the production, diffusion and reformulation of scientific and technical knowledge. The main argument of the project is that the internal cohesion of postcolonial development culture reached a critical dimension towards the end of the 1960s, allowing for systems stability and growth despite rather unfavourable changes in the politico-economic environment.

Before engaging with the case studies, the project investigates the characteristics of the relevant forms of knowledge, focussing on the discipline of economics. Of interest are the disciplinary appropriation of the biological concept of development; the definition of specific epistemic objects within the body of economic knowledge, such as the Gross Domestic Product; the mechanisms of drawing disciplinary borders by which positions of “true” statements are defined; and the role assigned to science and technology in development theory. This epistemological analysis is thought to foster a research tool for the analysis of the work of scientific and technical knowledge within postcolonial development culture. Another preliminary question is, whether new findings concerning the popularisation of scientific knowledge, revisioning simple sender-receiver-models into more complex concepts of communicative communities, can be applied to the relation between donors and recipients of technical assistance. While aid flows are characteristically directed from North to South, the flows of knowledge have always followed more chaotic lines, including field research and productive appropriation processes of prescriptions within Least-Developed Countries.

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