"The History of Development" by Gilbert Rist

The word "development," as discussed in our most recent posts, embodies a wide range of speculations and ideologies muddled together to represent an ongoing phenomenon based upon differing social, economic, and environmental encumbrance.  As of such, we as the dominating species, hold certain responsibilities regarding the future of our planet and the contingencies involved in sustaining life and achieving abundance for all beings on a fair, consistent level.  Poverty, after all, is one of the greatest challenges we face, even in an age of modernity, technology, and ever-increasing interdependence.  Obstacles such as poverty rely heavily on the term development and its encompassing archetypes.  Moreover, the emphasis of the word itself appears to evoke a sense of progression, expansion, or improvement.  Yet, according to Gilbert Rist, the wide discrepancies regarding the actual meaning of the word "development" has created a troubling paradigm, one that embodies a fixed way of thinking without actually resolving the real issues at hand. 

Rist begins his argument by relaying three different definitions of “development,” one from a dictionary, another from the Report of the South Commission, and the last from the Human Development Report of 1991 (published via the United Nations.) He comments on their central motifs of social evolutionism, individualism, and economics, yet questions their ability to epitomize the true meaning of such a widely used expression.  He attributes such fallacies to the tribulations of perception and personal belief (something he calls “imagined words,”) where each individual defines development according to his or her idea of the ideal life.

          
The reader is thus left to wonder, does development actually exist then?  Rist compels the reader to instead reconsider development as “a set of practices, sometimes appearing to conflict with one another, which require—for the production of society—the general transformation and destruction of national environment and of social relations.  Its aim is to increase the production of commodities (goods and services) geared, by way of exchange, to effective demand.”  From this definition, he slowly unravels all misconception and rhetoric associated with the term and replaces such fallacies with the idea of a phenomenon based on conflict and interaction in society, where economic needs are sanctioned at the expense of the majority.  It is this misinterpretation throughout the course of history that has thus allowed the suppression and exploitation of various levels of society.  Rist’s fundamental argument is that little progress can be made without disregarding mainstream economics and the paralyzing effects of prototype thinking.  Ultimately, it is this type of disillusionment through expression and skewed views that will continue to cause discrepancies among the modernized world and greater humanity in the name of "development."