Buzzwords and fuzzwords: deconstructing development discourse

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Poverty is, of all the buzzwords analysed in this collection, perhaps the most compelling in its normative appeal; as John Toye notes, ‘the idea of poverty reduction itself has a luminous obviousness to it, defying mere mortals to challenge its status as a moral imperative’. The moral unassailability of the development enterprise is secured by copious references to that nebulous, but emotive, category ‘the poor and marginalised’ (Cornwall and Brock 2005). Elizabeth Harrison draws attention to the ‘righteous virtue’ of anti-corruption talk, which she argues makes it virtually immoral to question what is being labelled ‘corrupt’, and by whom.

Many of the words that describe the worlds-in-the-making that development would create have all the ‘warmly persuasive’ qualities that Raymond Williams described for community in his memorable 1976 book Keywords. Among them can be found words that admit no negatives, words that evoke Good Things that no-one could possibly disagree with. Some evoke futures possible, like rights-based and poverty eradication (Uvin, Toye). Others carry with them traces of worlds past: participation and good governance (Leal, Mkwandawire), with their echoes of colonial reformers like Lord Lugard, the architect of indirect rule; poverty, whose power to stir the do-gooding Western middle-classes is at least in part due to its distinctly nineteenth-century feel; and development itself, for all that it has become a word that Gilbert Rist suggests might be as readily abandoned as recast to do the work that it was never able to do to make a better world.

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http://knowledgepolicy.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/buzzwords-and-fuzzwords-deconstructing-development-discourse/ Buzzwords and fuzzwords: deconstructing development discourse