Ongoing reflections ...

Negotiated approach to territorial "development": the major challenge: freeing ourselves from the conditioning factors implicit in the ontology of modernity with which we are imbued.

Those who know me or know the work that, together with several other people, I am doing in relation to the territorial approach, know that one of the difficult challenges is the idea of convincing the "experts" to move from a top-down view of the actors based on the principle that, because they have studied at prestigious universities, they know more than farmers, fishing communities, indigenous people or whatever, to one where instead of dictating solutions we try to facilitate dialogue between the different actors so that negotiation can take place, all with the aim of finding (if possible) common ground, what we call a pact. This is a very complicated paradigm shift, because it means giving priority to listening, humility and availability, which is the opposite of what is taught in the big schools where development agency technicians are trained (including myself).

In addition to this difficulty, there are many others, such as getting the most powerful actors to agree to enter into a process of dialogue/negotiation in which the aim is to reduce these power asymmetries in favor of the weakest. Other complex issues, which we try to introduce in this type of approach, have to do with the need to address issues of asymmetrical power not only between categories of actors, but also within the basic unit itself: the family, in order to address the gender issue in a non-superficial way.

In addition to all this, there is also a problem of another kind, more philosophical if you will, which we have never seriously discussed until now: our mental imprisonment with respect to a philosophical model of development in which we have been bathing since birth.

The starting point is the need to recognize that we, as professionals in the world of "development cooperation" (whether in UN agencies, NGOs, bilateral bodies and/or financial institutions), are historical products of what we can call an ontology of modernity. To better understand what I want to talk about, it is necessary to take a small step back, for which I have to thank a friend and colleague at the University of Grenoble, Kirsten.

The story begins in ancient Greece, when the principle of the eternal beginning dominated. As Kirsten writes, "the work of Aristotle, among others, reveals that ideas about the evolution of societies and their changes were intrinsically linked to the observation of the principles of nature and life cycles: generation, growth, decline. Thus, the term physis (nature) derives from the verb phuo (to generate, grow, develop) and was used to refer to both nature and development by some Greek philosophers. The notion of "nature" thus functions as a metaphor and refers to a cyclical conception of social/social change in Aristotle. In his work Metaphysics, he sees it as the essence of things that have a principle of motion in them, as "that which is born, grows and matures even in the end declines and dies, in a perpetual restart." 

From the end of the 17th century, the idea of a linear evolution of humanity and the ideology of progress became widely accepted. The idea of development was no longer linked to the awareness of a limit to conform to the laws of nature, but made it possible to conceive of progress in the sense of continuous growth and improvement for the good of humanity. 

These new values (emancipation, individual freedom and rationality) constitute the basis of a new economic system. They support and legitimize market capitalism and then accompany productivist economics and the beginnings of industrialization.  Development thus becomes growth, and the conception of social dynamics becomes synonymous with "progressive, inevitable, sequential and permanent": in short, this is the ontology of modernity: science, technology, faith in progress expressed in economic growth and the conviction of the superiority of modern ontology over all other ways of living and thinking in the world!

With the end of World War II and a worldview beginning to dominate the global agenda, the United States and its president, Truman, unequivocally clarified the conceptual basis of this vision, which saw, of course, the United States as the self-appointed ambassador of this vision. At this postwar moment, this vision allowed various Western interests to converge, giving them a new direction and a new role in the massive decolonization of the South that was then taking place. 

Thus, the discourse of this powerful man quickly took on the character of a vast "political project". The United Nations became involved, through the new cooperation agencies that were created: UNDP and FAO. We FAO workers are children of this long history and, whether we like it or not, we are imbued with it.

Not even the criticisms of this worldview carried out by the Marxist school, Gunter Frank's dependency theory and Samir Amin's theory of unequal development, which showed that it was the societal transformations induced by the North that created underdevelopment in the South, and not the persistence of "tradition", well, even these critical currents were still children of the same modern ontology: they did not criticize the objective of reaching the "developed" countries, nor did they criticize the approach centered on the economy. Therefore, the problem was not the objectives, but the means to achieve them.

Only with the relatively recent emergence of spontaneous and resistance movements in the South have we begun to ask ourselves whether "another world is possible". The answer is: yes! Other worlds are possible and exist, as well as other truths than those that have permeated us since our earliest days. 

Remembering that "truth is a social construct", and that therefore a dominant model that has permeated us for so long has had a way of instilling in us the demon that its truth of a modernizing model is the only possible one, we must make a great personal effort to begin to free ourselves from these chains.

The critical point of this long journey arises at the moment of contrasting a method based on dialogue, negotiation and agreement with another based on the domination of the strongest, which dominates and defines the very objectives and concepts of "development".

We know what we are fighting against, against that modernity in which the triad of (Western) science, technology and progress are the pillars of the holy grail of economic growth. But this is not enough. When we aim to be facilitators of negotiated territorial development processes, whether in conflict zones or not, we must ask ourselves what ontologically different visions are at stake among the actors. And to this question, which inevitably leads to an answer that will be plural, we will have to follow the trail to understand what we want to emerge from this type of processes and what philosophical horizon we place around them: the one dictated by donors or international financial organizations, which inevitably reflect that ontology of modernity that is beginning to creak, or do we want to become builders of a new ontology of post-development and post-modernity? And the new questions come like cherries, one spilling over the other: do we, who have chosen the role of facilitators of processes of this type, have the "reason" to take sides against or in favor of a modernity, which we feel is no longer sufficient to represent us, or of a postmodernity to be invented? What are we fighting for, for "development" or for a transformation of society?