Power, Knowledge and Subversive acts of the Poor

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is someone that comes up all the time in my readings around development.  This was particularly true in readings around the idea of participation.  Participation has been a buzzword in international development for around 30 years.  Now, with the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy project, participation, in a sense, is mainstream. Getting the poor involved in Development is the latest fashion.

So what does all this have to do with a famous French philosopher, the smiling, bald dude in the photo (right)? I have hardly read any of his writing (one lecture of his, to be exact), but I've read a lot more about his ideas. Essentially, Foucault is quoted with regard to the relationship between power and knowledge and how this is played out in Development.

Here's my faltering attempt to summarize what I know on this subject.  Knowledge is often created through relationships, discourses and the repetition of ideas. Relationships include norms of behaviour, certain expectations and often, a certain hierarchy.  These are not pre-ordained by an objectively true social order, they come about in the context of that relationship and they form knowledge about that relationship. The relationship reinforces that knowledge. Knowledge that is created in that relationship usually reflects the distribution of power in that relationship.  Both parties understand themselves in the context of the knowledge created by that relationship.  Unless new knowledge is created, countering the established knowledge, it is very difficult to change the power distribution of that relationship. Make sense? Okay, maybe not, so let me try to provide an example from development studies.

Poor people in an urban setting, illegally build shelters in what becomes a slum.  These people have very little voice or power in society and they are already on the wrong side of the law. So the government comes along with an order to evict everyone and destroy their shelters to make way for an airport runway extension, for example. Intuitively we know that the government has more power than the poor slum dweller.  In fact, we might see the slum-dweller as uneducated, incompetent and even in the way of progress.  And we know, without a doubt that the slum-dweller is illegally occupying land and therefore has no right to be there anyway. But stepping back, we might observe that what we believe to be true about the slum dweller is in fact based on knowledge constructed through the relationship between the more powerful party, the government and the less powerful party, the slum-dweller. Maybe the slum-dweller has the capacity to be a productive member of society, to build his or her own shelter, save money, and even tackle other infrastructure issues in the slum. Maybe the law that says the slum-dweller has no right to establish a shelter on that piece of land is a law that needs to be contested, a carry-over from another time, or even another political system.

That's not the best example, perhaps.  But it's my attempt to describe the kinds of knowledge that SDI (see my last post) is helping slum dwellers to contest, through the creation of new knowledge.  The processes that SDI and its affiliates use revolve around supporting the poor in the creation of new knowledge and in doing so, contest the prevailing knowledge and power structures that make it almost impossible to establish security of shelter and greater political voice. The tools that the slum dwellers use are simple, painstaking, slow and subversive (Patel 2004).  They get under the skin of those in power. These tools include settlement surveys (the creation of knowledge about how many people there are, where they live, what they do, etc.) conducted by the slum dwellers themselves and house-building demonstrations. Underpinning these and many other tools, is the community-building exercise of saving.  Poor people, organizing together to save regularly and in doing so, build trust, develop community and prove they are capable of managing money and, together, bigger projects - defying the embedded knowledge about poverty.

The primary criticism of the Development industry is that it fails miserably to understand and engage with structures of power and knowledge at all levels (local, national and global). In other words, mainstream Development interventions avoid political realities on the ground. James Ferguson, an anthropologist working in Lesotho in the 90s called Development the "anti-politics machine"(1994).  This is not to say that Development has an underlying agenda to ignore politics, just that the way that it operates cannot engage with politics (Li 2007). But the poor can.

Jordan (Manchester)

References:
Ferguson, J. (1994) The Anti-politics Machine. "Development," Depoliticization, and Bereaucratic Power in Lesotho, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Li, Tania Murray (2007) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics, Duke University Press, Durham.

Patel, S. (2004) Tools and methods for empowerment developed by slum dwellers federations in India, Particpatory Learning and Action, 50, IIED, London.