anthropologies: February 2012

I recently drove the entire length of the Baja California peninsula in two days. The main highway, which was completed in the early 1970s, is like an incredibly complicated, sometimes tragic, and sometimes beautiful plot line that weaves its way through numerous stories of “development.” Starting in Tijuana, and ending up in a place like Cabo San Lucas, well, there’s a lot happening in between those two positions on the geographic map. A lot of money, a lot of conflict, and a lot of different ideas about what development is supposed to mean. Memories, histories, hopes, desires. All branching out along this one, long, asphalt medium of ideas and actions. Development efforts--from the worst laid plans of Donald Trump to the ecotourism projects all around the peninsula--are deeply connected with this one road. Development runs a wide gamut, and it means many things.

What are we supposed to do, after all, with a term that can refer to anything from conservation and supposed “sustainable development” all the way to the creation of an insane water sucking desert city like Las Vegas? I have read my fair share of anthropological theory about development, but I will still admit that I find the whole concept quite elusive, if not outright confusing. It means everything—and of course that translates to it meaning almost nothing at all. Some people want development because it promises things like jobs, new roads, better water management, better communication systems—a whole range of possibilities. But then, some people want development because they are in a good position to make a quick buck, peso, Euro or two. Nothing wrong with that on the surface—it all depends.

That’s why the study of development is such a massive and seemingly impossible endeavor. Although some people find it easy to line up on either the “pro-development” or the “anti-development” or even the “beyond development” front, I don’t see any clear territorial position to really hold on to. As anthropologists such as Keith Hart make pretty clear, there are people all around the world who are actively seeking many of the benefits that come along with that ubiquitous process known as development. In my own fieldwork, which is about the politics of development in Baja California Sur, people have some pretty complex views about development. It's not just some simple for or against proposition. Some of the same people who are fighting hard for certain conservation movements will also readily tell you that they do indeed want jobs and opportunities. They want development, but a particular kind. Mostly, they want a say in how everything plays out.

Many people have asked me about my research, and one of the first questions is whether or not I am for or against development. I think this is an impossible question—if not a complete red herring. What I am interested in—whether we are talking about impending development in my home town, Mexico, or anywhere else in the world—is learning about the specific stories of the people who are dealing with these changes, and how their desires, rights, and hopes are being affected by the those massive social, political, economic, and cultural networks we like to subsume under the seemingly simple moniker, “development." Anthropology, it turns out, is pretty well placed to just that. We just have to get to it--and then communicate what we learn broadly, effectively, and creatively. Because none of it matters if nobody every hears what we have to say. Another obscure article in another BIG IMPORTANT JOURNAL locked behind a ridiculous paywall isn't going to get us anywhere. You know where I'm going with this. Communication and dialog matter.

This issue takes on the complex beast that is development through another selection of unique essays. We have contributions from Hsain Ilahiane & John Sherry, Chad Huddleston, Agustin Diz, Fred Radenbach & Sabina Rossignoli, Jason Roberts, and Eric Nost. We are also grateful to have a selection of photographs from photographer Elizabeth Moreno, who I want to thank for letting us share her work on anthropologies. Another great issue. Thanks everyone for taking part—and thanks to all the anthropologies editors for putting up with all my emails, questions, and updates. As ever, don’t be shy about commenting, sharing links, or even sending us an email if you’re interested in taking part in future issues. We are open to ideas and suggestions. Thanks!

R.A.

PS: Next’s month’s edition is going to be a double issue that takes on the behemoth of the Occupy movements/protests AND the whole fiasco over open access and publishing that’s going down with SOPA, PIPA, and the RWA. Considering the American Anthropological Association’s latest statement about these matters, well, I’m hoping next month’s issue will spark some interest. If you want to take part, send me an email: anthropologiesproject [at] gmail DOT com. Over and out.

Rethinking “Sustainable Development”, or, Better Living through Geography

I am skeptical of the utility of seeking out "sustainable" development in academic theory and applied practice. Place - a foundational concept in geography - matters for the viability of economic development in tourist destinations. Though tourism is heralded as the road to development for poor peoples (UNWTO 2005 in Schellhorn 2010), the ways tourists and locals maneuver to define place limit the promise of sustainable development. I have found that tourists who visit the southern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica perceive the region as authentically underdeveloped. That region, the caribe sur, depends upon tourism, but remains one of Costa Rica’s poorest. Because the value of the place boils down to its backwardsness, attempts to "develop" in themselves constrain the possibility of future growth.

A couple of recent events illustrate how place and development color each other. In the early morning hours of April 19th, 2008, a resident of Cahuita - a small settlement of about 1,000 on the coast - was shot and killed at a popular bar. The story made the national news and the town has received critical attention in recent years for gruesome violence in a place typically considered tranquilo. Negative press coverage is lamented by local business owners for scaring away potential tourists and damaging the local economy.

At around the same time, the University of Costa Rica newspaper published a front-page story on a marina complex to be sited in Puerto Viejo, a town about 15 kilometers south of Cahuita. The story articulated several of the potential ecological and social effects of the large-scale development, such as damage to nearby coral reef systems and crime (Chacón 2008). In a similar report, a female U.S. tourist explained, “I’m a tourist and if this is constructed I won’t come here anymore. I like the simplicity and naturalness of Puerto Viejo that would be lost with this" (Plaza and Carvajal 2008).

These events show that how tourists, the media, and others represent a place matters for its economic growth and that, in turn, development in place matters for the perception of place. The remark of the U.S. tourist is particularly striking as it gets to the crux of the sustainability question. She will only sustain her travels to Puerto Viejo if the marina project, which would generate substantial revenue but ruin the town’s “simplicity and naturalness”, is scrapped. What exactly is the true character of the town? And is such an essential definition even available?

Geographers understand that the meaning of place is always flexible and negotiated. Place is in part produced by capital, through development. Capitalism tends toward equalizing the rate of profit across space and in place as it achieves greater economies of scale while it simultaneously seeks niches which yield comparatively high rates of profit (Smith 1984). It is a commonplace that capitalist globalization standardizes places so that they become like everywhere else.

However, David Harvey (1990) has noted that in a globalized world, capital moves freely but locale remains fixed. In order to attract residents, businesses, or, in this case, visitors, places work to distinguish themselves from other, often homogenized, areas. Capital augments the assembly of place and place-identity (Harvey 1993; O'Hare 1997; Kneafsey 1998; Sywngedouw 1997) and as such, tourism may be "destroying" places, but at the same time it is creating others. Sustainable development advocates seek to rectify capital’s incessantly uneven global development, but ignore how place drives the process.

Place is paramount to understanding development - not because development takes place somewhere, but because place encapsulates crucial social relations. Notions of the caribe sur as having a fixed character express a social relation; they are a way of relating and ordering people, places, and resources. For the U.S. tourist quoted earlier, Puerto Viejo should remain simple and natural. For her and other tourists, the appropriate use value of this place is its genuine underdevelopment. But the traveler's desire for real difference inherently constricts avenues for development; growth does not occur in a social vacuum. Even relatively small-scale ventures like indigenous village visits bring in wealth and the resulting infrastructural changes turn-off many kinds of travelers, for whom the meaning of place no longer corresponds with their expectations (Young 1999). Additional development erodes the possibility of further, sustainable growth.

Those advocating sustainable development should strive to see place as the intersection of social relations, rather than attempting to managerially revalue people and resources and ignoring the very relations which may very well undermine such revaluing. As Cresswell (2000: 11) asserts, "place is a way of seeing, knowing, and understanding the world." Reading development in the caribe sur via place is a guide for critically appreciating contemporary patterns of tourism and development in both the caribe sur and elsewhere.

Eric Nost

References

Chacón, V. 2008 “Proyecto de marina enfrenta fuerte oposición” Semanario Universidad, 21 February 2008.

Cresswell, Timothy. 2004. Place: a short introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Harvey, David. 1993. From space to place and back again: reflections on the condition of postmodernity, in J. Bird (Ed) Mapping the Futures, pp. 3-29. Routledge.

Kneafsey, Moya. 1998. Tourism and place-identity: A case-study in rural Ireland, Irish geography, 31 (2): pp. 111-123.

O'Hare, Danny. 1996. Interpreting the cultural landscape for tourism development, Urban Design International, 2 (1): pp. 33-54.

Plaza, S. y Marvin Carvajal. 2008. “Plan para construir marina crea controversia en Puerto Viejo,” La Nacion, 5 April 2008.

Schellhorn, Matthias. 2010. Development for whom? Social justice and the business of ecotourism, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 18 (1): pp. 115-135.

Smith, Neil. 1984. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Blackwell.

Sywngedouw, Erik. 1997. Neither global nor local: "glocalization" and the politics of scale, in K. Cox (Ed) Spaces of Globalization, pp. 137-166. Guilford.

Young, Martin. 1999. The Social Construction of Tourist Places, Australian Geographer, 30 (3): pp. 373-389.

Traces: Landscape Transfiguration

Here is a selection of images from photographer Elizabeth Moreno's series "Traces: Landscape Transfiguration." These images speak to the changes--sometimes sublte, sometimes dramatic--that places can endure when they undergo the broad process known as "development." Here is the introduction to this series, from Moreno's web site:

Change is a constant and essential quality of life in this planet and universe we inhabit. A lot of people say things like: “we just have to accept it”, but as thoughtful beings we can question the nature of any change, decide if it is good or bad and act according with that judgment.

In this automated era ruled by a global and consumption oriented media, we are always either being bombarded by all kinds of information or so busy that we forget to question the metamorphosis that our planet is suffering, to which we are direct contributors and that we end up accepting, without even asking ourselves what the effects are.

During the last 10-15 years the natural environment in the Baja California peninsula, and in the whole world has suffered huge transformations and I think we must be conscious about them, especially those ones that involve destruction. When we ignore them, generally we realize the damage that has been caused once is too late to do something about it.

This work is a visual compilation of traces that our civilization leaves in the continuous transformation of the world that surrounds us. It is an attempt to set aside the kind of landscape photography that is just a visual placebo for the eye and create a purposive work. Through these images that make obvious the contrast between what is a human trace and the natural landscape, I invite you to thoroughly observe our environment, to reflect on how we are altering the planet we will inherit to future generations, and if you consider it valuable I also invite you to do something about its preservation.

See the rest of this series, here. Check out the rest of her work on her site--she also has a powerful series about coal production in Baja California Sur, and another striking documentary project about gypsum mining in Isla San Marcos. Elizabeth Moreno is from La Paz, in Baja California Sur, Mexico. She studied fine art and documentary photography in the United States, and since 2008 has been living La Paz, working on her personal documentary projects.

You Can Outthink a Tree…But You Can’t Outrun It’: Ruminations on Nature, Culture, and Redevelopment

A Brief Vignette on Nature and Culture in the Wildland-Urban Interface

“It is true. All we’re doing is just making rich peoples’ yards prettier. That’s what we do.” - Keedy

We ate our bagged lunches along the freshly paved, two-lane road leading up the mountain to “The Colony,” a gated, skiing community in Park City, Utah. We were taking our lunch break in a muddy area near a drainage culvert between the road and a steep, snowy stand of blown over aspen and firs. We had been working that morning to protect the community from wildfire by removing “hazardous” fuels (1). The juxtaposition of Red Mountain Fuels Mitigation crewmembers in hardhats and work clothes to the business-casual, community residents driving by in their new SUVs, trucks, and Mercedes could not have been more dramatic. In between bites of a bologna sandwich, Rat Face asked, “Where are all the homes?” Medina dragged hard on his cigarette and then replied, “They’re up at the top of the mountain…the rich go higher." (2)

Park City is a thirty-minute drive along I-80 from Salt Lake City. The drive to Park City takes one along a slow, winding ascent into the mountains to skiing and outdoor recreation areas. Narrow canyons with reddish-pink, rocky soil, abundant sagebrush, serviceberry, and gambel oak initially surround the traveler on his or her way to Park City. It is a dry, often flammable, landscape consisting of numerous rocky peaks and sparse valleys. The only significant developments in the area are the occasional large, dusty mineral mines visible from the highway. Urban sprawl seems to have leapfrogged this location, leaving only the highway behind to connect Park City to Salt Lake. It is, admittedly, a hard and uninviting landscape.

However, the view changes as the elevation increases and the temperature drops. The vegetation becomes a greener, yet similarly flammable, mixture of species such as lodgepole pine, subalpine fir, engelmann spruce, and aspen. The soil and rock are now dark gray in color and snow is visible on the mountaintops. The views must be what have inspired so much human settlement and development in this fire-adapted landscape. Small communities such as Parley’s Summit reveal brick, stucco, and log homes at the foot of the hills, behind the large, granite walls that line the freeway. These are precursors to the upcoming city. Human development increases, becoming denser as one approaches Park City and its various residential and commercial enclaves. Homes become bigger and more spread out as you climb the mountain. The transition starts with small, attractive, new houses and condominiums packed together at the bottom of the mountain and ends with behemoth estates spread across spacious, mountaintop lots.

Most of the buildings in Park City try to capture a certain woodsy quality, with many structures made of beautiful, golden pine logs—the houses, shopping centers, signs, even the car wash. The simulated rustic flavor in Park City attempts to portray this recently developed locale as anything but developed. Even the Mountain Dew machine at the local plant nursery has a picture of a waterfall pasted on the front. It is an enchanting scene, but as my coworker’s comments illustrate, it is defined by inconsistency: “Are those log homes? Because they look plastic, they’re so shiny.” “Yeah, my grandfather has a real cabin, it doesn’t look like that.”

Similar to Blakely and Snyder’s (1997: 14) discussion of the history of the suburbs, the creators of Park City have done “everything they could to dissociate their developments from the city.” Subdivisions in Park City boast nature inspired names such as “Jeremy Ranch,” “Bear Hollow Village,” “Deer Park,” “Red Pine Adventures,” “White Pine,” and “The Canyons.” The names are “meant to conjure up bucolic rural imagery and only coincidentally to reflect the actual landscape” (Blakely and Snyder 1997: 14). Slowly ascending the mountain in the old crew buggy, it is as if we have wandered into a countrified theme park—a commoditized romanticism of what the rural experience must have been like long ago. When we pull up in sight of an old fashioned wooden fence surrounding a grassy field in The Colony, my coworker Cymbals rants, “Rich people man, gotta put up a fake fence to make it look like they’re in the country even though everybody knows they’re fuckin’ rich.” Park City has all of the charm and beauty of a backwoods-hunting lodge with none of the associated inconveniences. This is urbanity’s wilderness, exurbia. This luxury class of residential and recreational development constitutes a re-“capitalized nature” (O’Connor 1993: 12) within the wildland-urban interface (3) and it is one of the bigger constraints to appropriate fuels management and the reintroduction of natural fire cycles in America.

Significantly, it is here that a mottled transition from utilitarian, extractive industries to those based upon service sector expansion and aesthetic consumption continues to reinforce the tendency towards ineffective fire management practices in the name of market maintenance. It is this reality that my coworkers and I became closely acquainted with during our season of work as we consistently performed aesthetically pleasing, yet minimally functional, fuels reductions in an apparent effort to maintain privileged lifestyles in beautiful landscapes. This was the reason for our presence in The Colony, a community whose name and features wittingly or unwittingly connoted a sense of imperialism that led me to further question the distribution of costs and benefits resulting from this form of (re)development.

Anthropology and Development

“So what are you gonna write about…how people hate slopes, sagebrush, and fires, but they like trees?” - Chunk

I cut my anthropological teeth, so to speak, working on a wildfire fuels mitigation crew and studying the relationship between contemporary wildland fire management and the re-capitalization of nature in the American West. This was not what I originally intended to study however. My original research interests were as naïve as they were tentative and do not really warrant sharing. Luckily, my coworkers would push the project in a much more important and largely unforeseen direction as once again I would confirm, “the old saw that ethnographers end up studying whatever their hosts want to talk about” (Metcalf 2002: 32). In my case, my hosts wanted to talk about issues that would leave me forever engrossed in an effort to understand the dialectical relationships between environmental management, economic development, sustainability, and equitability. I guess one could argue that I went “native” and never came back, but I prefer to think that I just found my niche doing what they call the anthropology of development.

One of the themes this issue is supposed to cover is the role of anthropologists in the study of development. Well, I am not yet a full-fledged anthropologist and my theories tend to be under-theorized, but the way I see it is that the anthropologist’s primary role is to tell the story. Tell the story of development; tell it as accurately as possible and in a way those outside the academy might be interested to understand. And, keep telling it. My own thoughts on the best way to go about doing this revolve around an increased effort to study the production and consumption of commodities equally (Bakker and Bridge 2006) in a way that connects the resilience of the capitalist system to the resilience, broadly construed, of its ecosystems (Gunderson and Holling 2002).

It is only years later that I have come to see that this was the fundamental process that I was witnessing during my time in Utah’s wildland-urban interface. In the palimpsest of forest and agricultural industries largely transferred abroad lay a resurgent landscape ripe for the consumption of scenic views and bucolic ideals; the consumption of the palimpsest. The emergent processes of capitalist dis-integration and re-integration were entirely contingent and yet oddly predictable. As some places became areas of increased consumption, others necessarily became areas of increased extraction and vice versa. I think these are the types of connections that Bakker and Bridge would like us to make, in the true spirit of the dialectical method.

When thinking back to my time working in the wildland-urban interface, I am consistently reminded of a classic line of advice offered to me and the rest of the “S-212 Wildland Fire Chainsaws” class by our lead instructor Wayne about the need for a proper plan of action before any tree felling operation: “you can outthink a tree…but you can’t outrun it.” I, like most of my classmates, laughed at this statement when it was originally uttered. Of course we did. It was silly. It was meant to be funny. And yet, it was a warning; a warning that now functions as a useful heuristic for my own thinking on the subjects of nature, culture, development, and the intrinsic relationships between the three.

What does it mean? Like all good heuristics it means a bit of nothing and everything all at the same time. Mostly, however, it just reminds me of the fundamental ties that bind the socioecological “collective” (Latour 1999) - the ever-evolving processes of production and reproduction (Foster 2000). If you are seeking to gain some insight into the essence of the human existence in Earth then these processes will probably form the basis of your studies. And, if you are looking at these processes, then you are probably studying development in some shape or form. So, can you outthink development? I do not know. Can you outrun it? Absolutely not. But, if you pay attention, you might be able to tell the story in a way in which others could learn.

Jason Roberts

(1) Manipulation or removal of vegetative fuels by mechanical means to reduce the likelihood of ignition and/or to lessen potential damage and resistance to control. Fire Terms Glossary. “Fuels Mitigation.” Accessed May 2010. (http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/nfp/glossary.htm#f).

(2) All personal communications with coworkers and other research participants were made in work-related settings (5/08 - 8/08) and are related to the reader through the use of pseudonyms.

(3) “The line, area, or zone where structures and other human development meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland or vegetative fuels” (U.S. Department of Interior and U.S. Department of Agriculture 1995: 21)

References

Bakker, Karen and Gavin Bridge. 2006. Material Worlds? Resource Geographies and the ‘Matter of Nature.’ Progress in Human Geography 30(1): 5-27.

Blakely, Edward J., and Mary Gail Snyder. 1997. Fortress America: Gated communities in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Foster, John Bellamy. 2000. Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Gunderson, Lance H. and C.S. Holling eds. 2002. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington: Island Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Metcalf, Peter. 2002. They Lie, We Lie: Getting on with Anthropology. London: Routledge.

O’Connor, Martin. 1993. On The Misadventures of Capitalist Nature. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 4(3): 7-40.

U.S. Department of Interior and U.S. Department of Agriculture. 1995. Final Report of the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy and Program Review. Boise, ID.

Development 2.0: what’s wrong with the “bottom of the pyramid” way to development?

One of the important shifts in development thinking to occur over the past three decades is the emphasis on “bottoms-up” market forces. Hallmarks of this shift include privatization, entrepreneurship, and access to capital through institutions such as microfinance. Many of these hallmarks are encapsulated in a development approach now commonly glossed as the “Bottom of the Pyramid” (Prahalad and Hart, 2002; Prahalad, 2004). One of the hallmarks of BoP thinking is a newly imagined role for multinational corporations and a de-emphasizing of the role of the state. Prahalad and Hammond assert that “prosperity can come to the poorest regions only through the direct and sustained involvement of multinational companies” (2002:49). Information technology similarly looms large in such analyses. Markets that were once either too difficult to reach or too poor and informal to be of interest can, so the thinking goes, be made accessible through the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs). Conversely, market forces are recognized as a key to the sustainable deployment of ICTs (e.g., Best and MacLay, 2002). Clearly, the proliferation of information and communications technologies (ICTs), especially mobile phones, seems to bear witness to the benefits such resources can bring to low income people around the world.

Beginning over a decade ago, a growing body of literature espoused what was regarded as an alternative to statist, top-down approaches to development in favor of more bottoms-up, market driven approaches. Elements of the argument of ‘the bottom of the pyramid’ are: (1) there is a vast untapped purchasing power opportunity among the poor and private companies can profit by selling consumer goods to the poor; (2) selling to the poor and creating new markets can be both an effective approach to overcome the obstacles of underdevelopment and an opportunity for corporations to profit; and (3) the direct use of the private sector and business-driven strategies, especially the business savoir faire of large multinational corporations, to tackle the ills of underdevelopment in the areas of agriculture, cosmetics, education, health, hygiene, nutrition, and telecommunications. This business proposition has been adopted by various development agencies. These claims rest on a set of business school case studies including Unilever in India and Casas Bahia in Brazil, and uses these examples to link the expansion of consumer goods sales (i.e. soap and credit) to educational interventions focused on the prevention and elimination of disease and micro-credit loans targeting the poor. For Prahalad (2004) and like-minded business experts (Prahalad and Hammond 2002; Best and Maclay 2002; Hammond et al. 2007), such business forays into the world of the poor represents a win-win solution for all stakeholders in the sense that economic and social objectives can be simultaneously attained. Consequently, they contend, that selling products to the poor is not only a wise economic transaction but also a poverty alleviation strategy in its own right.

Moreover, using the examples of the Grameen Bank’s business model to provide small loans to serve the needs of the poor and Unilver’s innovations in marketing soap as a social good, Prahalad and Hammond argue that the private sector has created a framework for development agencies to draw on in their efforts to deal with poverty alleviation. Within the logic of inclusive capitalism, corporations have been scrambling to expand market share of their brands among the poor, and have gone to the extent of collaborating with consumers and government and non-government organizations to publicize concerns about publics issues (i.e. health and micro-credit) so as to position their products (Simanis et al. 2008; Cross and Street 2009).

This shift has implications to the ways in which ‘development’ is framed, pointing to a fundamental re-assessment of the ways in which poverty is tackled. Using Foucault’s work on knowledge and power, anthropologists have challenged the assumptions undergirding the notions of development and modernization theories. They have argued that development industry with its institutions and ideologies while presented as scientific, objective, and politically neutral, actually construct their target populations in specific ways and exercise power and influence over them (Escobar 1990; Ferguson 1990; Gardner and Lewis 1996).

Escobar (1995), for instance, has probed the history and discourse of development and modernization in the so-called Third World, viewing these practices as part of the exercise of power, what he refers to as “mechanisms though which a politics of truth is created and maintained, through which certain forms of knowledge are given the status of truth” (1995:45). Development and its modernizing practices, he argues, use a repertoire of instruments and techniques to organize and arrange a particular form of knowledge and a particular type of power. The expertise and knowledge base of development planners transcends the social reality of the clients of development projects, who are identified and thus structured into particular roles, categories, and attributes (women-headed households, backward, irrational, poor, isolated, inefficient, underserved communities, emerging, and so on…). While clients are seen as individuals who are in need to be lifted from poverty, Escobar argues, development planners control target populations and limit their room to be creative. The implications are that development, especially top-down initiatives, will transform and modernize target populations and areas; and, second, that change is driven by outside developers (Escobar 1990).

A careful reading of the BoP literature and examination of associated efforts suggest similar critical vulnerabilities. We summarize these in terms of four key critiques:

BoP literature ignores the effects of social inequality. In its theorizing of “the poor” the BoP literature ignores forms of social stratification within societies; either because it assumes these to be homogeneous or because it hopes eventually economic growth will level the playing field for everyone. And yet, as research has shown, structural inequities can be reinforced by BoP interventions. In his ethnographic account of the Grameen Bank lending practices in Bangladesh, for instance, Rahman (1999) demonstrates that in targeting women for microloans and the use of women groups as social collateral, microcredit actually creates debt, violence, and perpetuates social hierarchies among women. Rahman also shows that the assumption that women can be empowered with microcredit is problematic. He clearly shows that the discourse of gender and development assumes that all women are equal and homogeneous, thus neglecting the underlying structural factors such as patriarchy and the code of honor and shame that play a significant role in shaping and perpetuating gender inequalities. Thus, women do not necessarily benefit from their loans, and some women obtain loans on behalf of their male relatives. Consequently, through the deliberate use of patriarchy and its network of cultural values and social obligations to expand capital penetration, microcredit programs succeed in exacerbating gender inequalities and disentitling women rather than empowering them. Like Rahman, Rankin (2001) examines the impacts of microcredit in Nepal and argues that microloans constitute obstacles to women’s empowerment. She contends that women’s perceived lack of empowerment is not due to the lack of capital, but due to “constraints on the ownership of property and on women’s mobility outside the household limit their capacity to expand markets, invest in technology, or innovate in response to new opportunities” (2001:31). Rankin argues that microloans, far from empowering women, are channels for the state to mediate the articulation of the global discourse and practices of neoliberalism with local development concerns. In essence, microcredit programs serving the bottom of the pyramid, she states, provide strategies to deepen the reach of global capitalism and in a way that also serves state power and presence at the local levels of decision-making (Rankin 2001). This ideological lapse present in both original development agendas and their current neoliberal manifestation, downplays the power dynamics that have made the poor poor and partially visible in the first place.

Emphasis on market-based solutions depoliticizes poverty. Some (Sen 2000) regard this emphasis on market-based solutions as a deliberate attempt on the right to depoliticize the debate surrounding human development and the right to make demands on the state. Regardless of intentions, an overly simplistic or optimistic embrace of privatization can clearly highlight such tensions. Consider the example of the Cochabamba water wars in Bolivia. In 2000, with the support of the World Bank the government of Bolivia sold control of its public water utility to a consortium of private companies (Aguas Del Tunari). The people of Cochabamba refused to pay higher water prices and when the government failed to reverse its water privatization decision, a coalition of peasants, teachers, students, and workers formed and joined in public protests to keep water under local public control. These demonstrations led to the declaration of a state of emergency and the suspension of rights to strike and legitimization of the use of the armed forces to quell civil discontent and unrest. Ultimately, Aguas del Tunari withdrew from the deal and the protests organizers terminated the strikes. As the demands for privatization of government water delivery services are increasing on a global scale, with proponents claiming that the poor will benefit from the dividends of privatization, grassroots movements are increasingly contesting the direct intervention of private corporations in these critical economic and social spheres. There is also growing evidence that privatization results in higher fees for basic services and is failing to reach poverty-strapped segments of society and those who have no access (Olivera and Lewis 2004; water makes money 2010).

Market-based solutions overemphasize consumption at the expense of political agency. To enlist multinational corporations in market-based solutions to poverty entails an imagination of the global poor as a vast, untapped “market” of consumers. As (Karnani, 2007) has pointed out, there is no single, vast market in any sense. More to the point, in the BoP business case studies, the poor are primarily imagined as consumers, whose agency, if imagined at all, is primarily construed in terms of choice exercised with respect to product offerings. This technique of labeling the poor in apparently value-neutral categories does not simply redirect discourse on basic human needs and services away from the political but also disempowers supposed recipients of any real economic agency. Few of the technologies, programs, or institutions examined in the BoP literature represent resources that local entrepreneurs are able to own, appropriate and master in ways that suit their level of skill and recognition of local opportunities. Rather, initiatives such as the Grameen Bank and Unilver’s soap tend to focus the entrepreneurial urge, structure activities, and even appropriate local resources (such as local coping mechanisms and funds of social capital) to deepen the reach of non-local interests (Elyachar 2005; Karnani, 2007).

Market-based models overlook the role of local entrepreneurial agency in the making of networks of value. On close examination, particularly in light of the critiques of BoP, our data on the use of mobile phones in Morocco show that there is much more going on, and point to some important considerations in market-based approaches. Perhaps at the base of all insights is the recognition that entrepreneurism requires a considerable amount of agency - in particular agency with regards to the creation and activation of networks for the creation of value. “Value networks” are an assumed unit of analysis in contemporary business literature for mature markets and industrialized settings, yet this seems to be an underappreciated concept in the market-based development literature. As our research also shows, given the scarcity of material resources in places such as our research site, these value networks will, we argue, artfully blend both social capital and financial and business relationships.

Hopefully, insights such as these will help us achieve a greater sophistication in our understanding of market-based development strategies.

Hsain Ilahiane

University of Kentucky

John Sherry

Intel Corporation

Bibliography

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anthropologies

Pages

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Issue 11

Introduction: Development and other stories

Rethinking “Sustainable Development”, or, Better Living through Geography

Traces: Landscape Transfiguration

You Can Outthink a Tree…But You Can’t Outrun It’: Ruminations on Nature, Culture, and Redevelopment

Development 2.0: what’s wrong with the “bottom of the pyramid” way to development?

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