Cultural hegemony in "development”

The concept of cultural hegemony has been bequeathed to us by Antonio Gramsci, of which he wrote in the Prison Notebooks and which indicates the various forms of cultural "domination" and / or "intellectual and moral direction" by a group or class that is able to impose on other groups, through daily practices and shared beliefs, their views until their internalization, creating the conditions for a complex system of control. (Wikipedia)

 

Below I will present some brief thoughts on the application of this concept in the topic of "development".

 

I think it is possible to consider that the practice of interventions called "development" in the so-called "third world", has been growing since the 80s of the last century, roughly in parallel with the emergence of neoliberal ideology of which the political progenitors were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the intellectual ones came from little known groups such as the Mont Pelerin Society, which prepared the academic ground that would later flood the world starting with Milton Friedman and his followers in Pinochet's Chile.

 

Their influence on "development" policies and programs was such that, without fear of contradiction, we can say that all (non-governmental) organizations that engaged in "development" were born in opposition to the neoliberal cultural hegemony. At the level of governments, the creation of institutions responsible for "development cooperation" has followed different paths and times, but I think we can say that, for obvious reasons, the opposition to the neoliberal world has always been much more measured. Finally, at the supra-governmental level, United Nations agencies, being the point where national power asymmetries coagulate, have always been affected by the cultural environment in which they bathed, so if at the level of individuals (officials) criticism was (and is) very strong, as one moves up the hierarchical ladder, criticism disappears and is diluted in an institutional rhetoric full of good intentions but with no practical effect.

 

The only real challenge to this cultural hegemony has come from the world of peasant organizations (movements). Exemplary in this sense is the case of Via Campesina, born in the early 80s, in the midst of the rise of neoliberal thinking and influenced (in opposition) by the censorship and restrictions imposed by the military dictatorial governments of many southern countries. Over the years it tried to impose a kind of counterculture based on concepts derived from socialist thought and the ancestral experiences of the peasant peoples they wanted to represent. Having grown over the years to become a sort of international counter-model, it is now suffering from a sort of laxity on the part of the new generations who, even when they have put it on the Olympus of myths, stay away from it in practice, probably because of managerial practices that are still predominantly patriarchal, very reluctant to open up to positions other than the orthodoxy they themselves have defined.

 

In this case we cannot speak of a real hegemony, because in fact their influence in the daily life of development workers has always remained marginal.

 

What I fought against during my years at the FAO was another form of cultural hegemony, which does not want to recognize itself as such, more subtle but which in fact has permeated in a lasting way the way of thinking and therefore of operating, of an important part of the organizations of both the North and the South.

 

The first point that made me think was my encounter (in the 1980s) with some Italian NGOs that were involved in agricultural development, first in Nicaragua and then in the Ivory Coast. They were different organizations, in terms of origin and political orientation, but what they had in common was what I would call an unconscious sense of superiority towards the peasant women and men of the South. It was a mix of superficial empathy evident in the desire to be welcome, but in never going to study in depth the societies in which they wanted to intervene, which would have taken much more time to prepare, which would have perhaps led to questions about the meaning of what "we" wanted to bring to "them." and an unequivocal belief that "we", who came from ancient and still existing peasant societies, and who had "developed" after the second war thanks to mechanization and chemical industry in agriculture, had the answers to their "problems". In other words, without knowing it, these colleagues had internalized without any critical spirit what Arturo Escobar had well detailed in his book The Invention of the Third World - Construction and Deconstruction of Development (which I would read many decades later). Or, seen from another perspective, they re-proposed, with a few variations, the same discourse of "modernization" of agriculture proposed/imposed by the Americans on our European agricultures at the end of the second conflict, based on their mythical "Yeoman Farmer" (https://discover.hubpages.com/politics/Myth-of-the-Yeoman-farmer#:~:text=The%20western%20Yeoman%20did%20not%20have%20particularly%20high,were%20changing%20their%20views%20on%20Agriculture%20in%20society).

 

Over the years I have met other realities, sometimes sincerely more concerned with "understanding" the societies where they were called to operate, but always at a very superficial level. The same can be said for the disproportionate belief in technology coming from the North. Even when these technologies became "appropriate", the question of what the real causes of the problem were was rarely asked beforehand, and whether the request for intervention was an original and genuine demand of those populations or was becoming an administrative practice, a request made by donors, anxious to prove to their taxpayers that the money spent on "development cooperation" was well spent (value for money, as the Anglo-Saxons say, with their rhetoric of the economic, efficient and effective - https://www.oecd.org/development/effectiveness/49652541.pdf).

 

If my criticism of these ways of looking at things came naturally to me right away, much depended on the teachings of my mentor Marcel Mazoyer who, in the Chair of Comparative Agriculture and Agricultural Development at INAP-G, used to start the year by reminding us of two sound principles: the first was that we had to understand what game we wanted to play (il faut savoir à quoi on joue) and the second was to remind us that no one had invited us to set foot in the countries, economies and cultures of the South. It was our choice that, in fact, we imposed on peoples who did not ask us to do so.

 

The sneaky aspect that I have struggled against, and still struggle with, is the rhetoric of participation. I have no doubt that when the proposal for more participatory approaches was introduced (in the 1970s), it was a small revolution that wanted to go against the dimension of undisputed dominance that experts (obviously male and white) had, whose word was gospel and for whom local populations were the receptacles of their directives, without them being recognized as having historical and cultural depth, as well as technical, in short, a concrete base from which to start. Starting to talk about participation was therefore radically different, so much so that the FAO funded for many years a People's Participation Programme that I knew in my first years with the organization.

 

However, a concept, whatever it may be, must evolve over the years, according to the changing realities in which it is called upon to operate, or else it will become obsolete or, worse, be transformed in unwanted directions. This is what has happened with "participation", as the dominant cultural elite has taken possession of it, to the point of emptying it of content, so much so that my old friend Hernan Mora coined the epithet "participulacion", that is, manipulated participation, used to pretend to listen to the opinions, criticisms and proposals of the counterparts with whom one works, without this "listening" making a dent in the predetermined positions of those who lay down the law, donors and/or development operators.

 

The best way to subtly impose the transformation of "participation" into "particupalacion" has been to make it pass the scrutiny of the dominant neoliberal economic creed. A participatory approach takes time, in fact we could say that it is impossible to determine a priori how long it will take to create a feeling of credibility of the foreign person to the community, in the eyes of those who are members of the community, so that a real dialogue between open people will arise. Time is money, and no donor has the "luxury" of spending too much time establishing trust (again, in the name of the rhetoric of the local taxpayer who wants value for money). I experienced this in a project financed by Dutch cooperation with us at FAO in the Kafa region of Ethiopia: the initial project document, rejected by the donor, who then decided not to give the money to the NGO that had prepared it, was written in the capital without ever going to the areas of operation, because they were far away, uncomfortable, it would have taken too long, etc.etc.. 

 

FAO accepted the money and asked me to propose a person to go and take care of the implementation. I proposed a friend, Alberto, with whom I had worked in other countries, a free-range agronomist, who went to install himself in the village from where the operations would be managed. It didn't take long for him to realize that the project document not only had nothing to do with it, but worse still, had created a climate of distrust towards the "foreigners" who wanted to do "development". It took nine months to get everything back on its feet, to create an atmosphere of true cooperation, both with the local authorities (and those who have worked in Ethiopia understand what I'm talking about) and with the communities. The pressures FAO received from the donor were hard to keep up: their concern was the typical donor concern, which was to show that the money given is spent (first and foremost) and then, perhaps, spent well. My FAO bosses rejected the responsibility on me, since I was the one covering Alberto's work on the ground, and since I had broad shoulders (and also a certain reputation), they eventually waited. Once trust was restored, the project went very well, but remained a drop in the bucket. FAO continued to look for money to make projects, perhaps written in a couple of hours (as was the case when Lula was elected in Brazil, in agreement with the Director General of the time, it was decided that by December 31 (before the administrative deadline and the budget was closed), we were in November, a dozen projects related to the slogan "Zero Hunger" had to be prepared and approved. I know friends who started writing these projects at Christmas, and in five days they were cooked and eaten. I think it would be better to draw a veil over the quality and adaptation to local realities, as well as the level of "participation".

 

The years have passed. I, and those who worked with me, went ahead not only with the criticism of this "participatory" cultural hegemony, but also with the proposals, put in a simple and clear way since the early 2000s. Talking about negotiation and no longer about participation was a way of introducing terminology from the business world, so that it would be clear that the local populations, the objects of the "project", were also defending very concrete interests (and rights), so it wasn't enough to have a participatory meeting, maybe with half of the women so they could say they were gender-sensitive and then take a picture to put in the newspaper. Negotiating also means that an agreement can be reached, if there is a consensus of the parties, but also not. So, it's no longer enough to say "we'll bring you a million dollar project"... you have to build empathy, trust, listen to their logic, their ways of seeing the world and be prepared for a possible "no thanks!" response. But talking about dialogue and negotiation also means talking about power dynamics, and this is the aspect that scares us the most, both the UN agencies and the governments, North and South, and finally also the organizations operating on the ground. 

 

All these entities prefer to do what Berlusconi would have called the "theater" of cooperation. Pretending to do something structural, sending young people with little experience to make their bones, writing stories from the ground up and, in the end, everything remains the same as before.

 

The point is that this cultural hegemony of participation, even if it has had some contact with the neo-liberal world, is actually the unintended result of a way of doing "development" that remains the child of the same colonialist history as always. We don't want to look inside ourselves, we prefer to externalize catholic sentiments, of "let's love each other, I'm doing my best", which is what we do best, but which doesn't even superficially touch the reasons for this "underdevelopment". Studying, understanding, criticizing and proposing are all steps that require time, efforts of will and self-critical skills, everything that seems to be missing in the Barnum of cooperation.