Learning to Learn: Undoing the Gordian Knot of Development Today

Development the world over is a partially successful and partially failed experiment. Urgent questions about its means reverberate more and more often with broad doubts about its goals. Its deep flaw is its dirigisme: the assumption, common to nearly all development theory, that there is an expert agent—the State for the dogmatist and orthodox left, the International Monetary Fund or other guardians of market orthodoxy for the right—that already sees the future of development, and can therefore issue instructions for arriving there. Whether through celebration of the developmental state or by adulation of a cosmopolitan, technical elite, this dirigisme has led to unholy alliances with the powerful and the exclusion of the weak. Conceptually, dirigisme is expressed as a set of theories of the requirements of economic development under particular conditions: a list (different, again, for the left and right, and under constant, confusing revision, it seems, by both) of the institutional prerequisites for self-sustaining growth. In practice the dirigiste mentality presents a set of policy recipes for determining how investment funds will be allocated, tax rates set, and currency conversion managed. It is these recipes that suppress the diversity of forms of life, by defining which ends of humankind are “feasible,” and accrediting some sources of knowledge while discrediting others. Such a straightjacketed conception of the order of things diminishes the attainment here and now of human potential, and accentuates the propensity to misapply technology and ideas, with too often disastrous consequences – discovered, and admitted, too late. No wonder development by dirigiste stages and recipes seems to many more an invitation to collective self-abnegation than a reliable promise of regeneration.