Compare, Vol. 31, No.

3, 2001

Development as Discourse: what relevance to education?

ANNA ROBINSON-PANT, Centre for Applied Research in Education, UK

ABSTRACT Regarding development as a constructed and contested concept can enable

us working in international education to re-examine our assumptions and approaches as
developers. Given its theoretical origins in post-modern, post-colonial and feminist
thought, the concept of development as discourse implies more than simply development
speak and can provide a way into analysing relationships around knowledge and power.
Stressing that there are many overlapping discourses, rather than just one Development
Discourse, I explore in this paper the insights gained, methods used and constraints
faced when using this approach during eldwork in Nepal. Practical situations like
literacy classes or meetings, and texts such as funding proposals or students writing,
illustrate how analysis of development discourses can bring out new dimensions relevant
to training and planning. Moving from this micro-level to a wider context, I argue that
the ideological dimension of educational planning and policy needs to be recognized and
analysed through a focus on discourse. Instead of suggesting that a certain policy
succeeds or fails in technical terms, policy makers can then begin to ask different
questions which acknowledge the political agendas of the various development players
and allow for a greater variety of voices to be heard.

What does it mean to say that development started to function as a discourse,

that is, that it created a space in which only certain things could be said and
even imagined? (Escobar, 1995a, p. 39)
The educational policy maker in the World Bank, the classroom teacher in Mumbai, and
the academic researcher in a UK university may all share a common aim of improving
education in the South. But what we see around the world is a bewildering series of
contradictions. Examples include a stress on diversity in policy documents, yet an
overriding trend in practice towards uniform patterns of educational provision; teachers
who appear to use participatory methods, such as ipcharts and small group discussions,
yet hold an authoritarian attitude towards their students. One way of reacting to these
contradictions is to dismiss them as due to poor implementation or empty political
rhetoric. However, it is also possible to adopt a more creative approach, to begin to
explore this space in which only certain things could be said (Escobar, ibid.)and
done. The concept of development as discourse can provide a way into acknowledging
and analysing the complexities, rather than reducing everything to a simple policy
equation or model.

ISSN 0305-792 5 print; ISSN 1469-3623 online/01/030311-1 8

2001 British Association for International and Comparative Education
DOI: 10.1080/0305792012009846 4
312 A. Robinson-Pant

Based on my experiences of adult literacy in Nepal, this paper explores how new
insights can be gained into programme implementation and policy evaluation through
using the conceptual lens of development as discourse. Over the past decade, the term
discourse has frequently been used in debates on education and aid, particularly to
critique asymmetrical relationships between donors and recipient governments (e.g.
King, 1991). However, these critiques of the dominant aid discourse have tended to
address only macro level policy issues, usually within the prevailing economistic
paradigm of educational research and using the term discourse to generalize about
dominant approaches to development policy (King, 2000). This paper moves on from
these aid critiques to look at how a more dynamic notion of discourse, drawn from
Foucaults seminal work on knowledge and power (Foucault, 1972; 1980; Rabinow,
1986), can enable us to introduce micro level analysis of educational strategies and
practices into the policy arena. As an adult educator and researcher in Nepal, I found that
the concept of development as discourse led me to a new perspective on all too familiar
debates, such as my role as a Northern aid worker, the gap between policy and practice
and how critical Freirean literacy approaches all too often turn out to be domesticat-
ing. This paper is intended to introduce this wider concept of development discourse
to those working in international education who are less familiar with the anthropolog-
ical literature on discourse, or indeed with ethnographic approaches to educational
research.

Introducing the Concept of Development as Discourse

I rst came across this concept when writing my PhD thesis, which looked at the links
between womens literacy and development. When preparing for my eld research, I had
put all my efforts into understanding and exploring the literacy side of the question: what
kind of literacy should I explore, should I work in classrooms or in everyday settings,
which groups of women should I work with? During the eight months eldwork in Nepal
(alternating between two contrasting NGO programmes), I began to realize that my
problem actually lay in the term development. Having rejected quantitative measures
of development, like rates of child mortality or fertility, I was left with a dilemma about
which aspects of development to discuss in relation to literacyand even whose
de nition of development to accept. Throughout the eldwork period, I had observed
people at village level arguing about development, NGO staff teaching development
to community members, and many people making jokes or sarcastic remarks about the
developed (such as myself, a white English woman [1]). I began to realize that
development was a contested term and that what I was analysing was not the links
between literacy and development, but how the concept development was constructed
in literacy classrooms, textbooks, everyday conversations and aid agency projects. When
I later came across Escobars (1995a) book, Encountering Development, the idea of
development as discourse provided me with a new tool for analysing the varied
educational experiences I had observed: such as a womens group meeting where NGO
staff taught women how to ll in accounts sheets and write an agendaor classes where
women ridiculed the characters in their course book who represented the ideal devel-
oped behaviour of not drinking or smoking.
Thus at the micro level of educational interventions and policy, the concept of
development as discourse proved useful to me in analysing local peoples reactions to
development programmes and for exploring what Long & Long (1992) call the
interface between the developed and the developer [2]. As well as discussing some
 Development as Discourse 313

of the speci c ways I used this concept in my eldwork in Nepal, including the tools of
analysis, this paper will also explore how those formulating and supporting educational
policy at central level might thereby gain new insights on common indicators such as
literacy retention and class drop-out rates.

Origins
The idea of development as a construct rather than an objective state (Gardner &
Lewis, 1996, p. 1) emerged over the last decade, as post-modern and feminist thinkers
began to challenge earlier assumptions about the nature of knowledge and progress.
Crush (1995, p. 4) summarizes these in uences as:
the textual turn in social sciences and humanities;
the impact of post modern, post colonial and feminist thought on the truth claims of
modernism;
a growing struggle to loosen the power of Western knowledge and reassert the value
of alternative experiences and ways of knowing.
The textual turn refers to the move within disciplines like anthropology to look at the
conventions of writing and representation by which Western institutions make sense of
the world: what is important is how, rather than what, things are known (Gardner &
Lewis, 1996, p. 74). From early roots in Westerners creating texts about the natives,
anthropology now encompasses a focus on the way that other cultures are represented
in such texts, looking at how Western countries not only dominated their colonies
politically and economically, but used their power to represent a certain image of, for
example, the Oriental (Said, 1979). Anthropology no longer speaks with authority for
others de ned as unable to speak for themselves (Clifford & Marcus, 1986, p. 10): in
other words, the emphasis has shifted to consider who speaks? who writes? when and
where?
Leading on from this idea of representation and colonial power has come an interest
in development as a similarly dominating discourse. Writers in colonial days often
portrayed an idea of Britain civilizing the natives, bringing order to chaotic disorderly
territory. Crush (1995) quotes from Johnston (1895) on Malawi: the civilized, ordered,
white, male, English landscape erases its unordered, savage, chaotic, dangerous African
predecessor. He suggests that the images associated with development, such as order
and stability, present a similar picture and that where colonialism left off, development
took over (Kothari, in Watts, 1995). Gardner and Lewis (1996, p. 5) also point out that
development discourse in the 1990s often echoes the concerns of colonial rulers, such as
good government and institution building. The parallels between development and
colonial discourses therefore bring into question the objectives of developers and the
strategies they employ:
development discourse is embedded in the ethnocentric and destructive
colonial (and post-colonial) discourses designed to perpetuate colonial hier-
archies rather than to change them. It has de ned Third World peoples as the
other, embodying all the negative characteristics (primitive, backward and so
forth) supposedly no longer found in modern, Westernized societies. This
representation of Third World realities has provided the rationale for develop-
ment experts belief in modernization and the superiority of the values and
institutions of the North. (Parpart, 1995, p. 253)
314 A. Robinson-Pant

As Kaufmann (1997, p. 107) points out, many developers are more aware of the power
structures and relationships they operate within, but that Development is at best a
dialogue, at worst the imposition of a set of (our) processes and beliefs on the other.
The question of what is truth or knowledge has been central to anthropologists work
on colonial discourses. The production of Western knowledge is seen as inseparable
from the exercise of Western power: knowledge is power, but power is also knowledge.
Power decides what is knowledge and what is not knowledge (Alvarez, in Crush, 1995,
p. 5). Feminist and post-modern thinking has stressed the impact of development
institutions on the production and representation of knowledge: Development is no more
true than any other way of understanding and acting upon the world. It is just that as
an organising discourse it is often more powerful (Gardner & Lewis, 1996, p. 75).
Questioning the domination of Western theories, feminists point out that development
programmes are shaped by an image of the homogeneous third world woman
(Mohanty, 1991) who becomes their target: third world women are represented as
having needs and problems but few choices and no freedom to act (Escobar, 1995a,
p. 8).
Though the concept of development as discourse originated in feminist and post-
modern theoretical writing (Marchand & Parpart, 1995), new research methodologies
(such as Longs (1992) actor-oriented approach) and participatory development ap-
proaches like PRA [3] (Chambers, 1994) have strengthened the idea that there can be
alternative ways of knowing and doing development. The sense of development as
discourse used in this paper thus draws not just on anthropologists movement towards
deconstruction of colonial and modernization discourses in policy texts, but the creative
work by development practitioners, often in the South, to acknowledge and value
alternative discourses through more participatory action research.

What is Development Discourse?

Discourse is a term that is increasingly used in every eld of life, even in everyday
conversation where it is often used in the sense of talk or speech. Taken in this sense,
development discourse comes to mean the speci c jargon and terminology used by
development agencies. Terms frequently used in aid agency reports and policy docu-
ments, such as target group and empowerment, might come into this category.
Development discourse can however encompass much more than development speak,
if we take a wider de nition of the term discourse:
Discourses are composed of people, of objects (like books), and of character-
istic ways of talking, acting, interacting, thinking, believing, and valuing, and
sometimes characteristic ways of writing, reading, and/or interpreting. Dis-
courses are out in the world, like books, maps and cities. (Gee, 1992, p. 20)
a discourse is not just a set of words, it is a set of rules about what you
can and cannot say (Barrett, 1995) and about what. (Apthorpe & Gasper, 1996,
p. 4)
Discourse includes language, but also what is represented through language.
A discourse (e.g. of development) identi es appropriate and legitimate ways of
practising development as well as speaking and thinking about it. (Grillo,
1997, p. 13)
These three de nitions all stress that discourse is much more than speaking or writing,
 Development as Discourse 315

FIG. 1. Reproduced from Save the Children USA ipchart.

but is around rules and characteristic, appropriate, legitimate ways of acting. Implicit
here are the issues raised in my earlier discussion about knowledge and power (Foucault,
1972): when there are so many different rules, different ways of speaking or writing, who
legitimates and controls discourses? The hierarchical and changing relationship between
different discourses is central to this wider concept of development discourse, as
compared to the more static concept of development speak. Signi cantly, discourse
also implies analysis of what is excluded, what cannot be said or done.
What we are talking about here is development as a regime of representation: the
manner in which Development constructs the world (Crush, 1995, p. 2) or the ways in
which development discourse constructs the object of development (Grillo, 1997, p. 19).
The discourse determines not just the kind of development interventions, but in uences
the relationships between village communities and development workers (see Crew &
Harrison, 1998). To turn at this point to some concrete examples of development
discourse, Fig. 1 shows how development is represented in a ipchart produced by an
American aid agency in Nepal. The chart was prepared for staff who were training
village women in leadership development. The ipchart is a useful example, because
it does not just consist of words, development speak, but illustrates a discourse in terms
of actions and relationships. The picture is accompanied by the following caption (in
Nepali):

This is the scene of a womens group monthly meeting. Because all the group
members are uneducated, they have to ask someone from outside to write the
minutes of meetings, monthly reports, maintain the accounts of the group and
group members dont look interested in the meeting.
316 A. Robinson-Pant

The ipchart consists of the story of this group of women told through a series of
pictures and captions. From being undeveloped, illiterate, and disorganized, the women
learn through an adult literacy course, not only how to read and write, but how to be
disciplined in meetings (the last picture shows them sitting in an orderly circle) and
follow democratic procedures (they elect one member to attend a skills training course).
At the end of the chart, all the women go to the bank on their ownsigni cantly,
without the well-dressed womens development of cer (who is prominent in all the other
scenes)to obtain a loan.
Relating this ipchart to the earlier de nitions of discourse, we can see that
development is associated here with several sets of rules. For example, development
(such as income generating activities) should be carried out in groups, not individually,
under the guidance of a development worker (portrayed as a Nepali woman, but richer
and more educated than the village women). The rules suggest that certain activities are
appropriate, such as conducting meetings, attending adult literacy classes and skills
training courses. Within meetings, certain practices are expected, like keeping minutes
and setting an agenda, behaving in a disciplined way and electing a chairperson. The
ipchart conveys a strong message about the characteristics of a developed person
(above all, literate, but also nancially independent, disciplined and well dressed), and
also about the practices associated with development. Analysing the ipchart from a
discourse angle enables us to focus on the power relationships between developers and
developed, not just in the actual pictures of interactions, but in the way the ipchart is
to be used as giving a message to the recipients of aid. We are also aware of the kinds
of knowledge and practices valued by the aid agency, such as Western versus indigenous
forms of record keeping (see Robinson-Pant, 2000a).
Considering development as discourse thus shifts attention onto the power relation-
ships both at local and international level between developers and developed, and onto
the rules that in uence how development is carried out or which practices are valued. As
Escobar (1995a, p. 41) usefully summarizes:
the system of relations [between development institutions, forms of knowl-
edge, etc.] establishes a discursive practice that sets the rules of the game: who
can speak, from what points of view, with what authority, and according to
what criteria of expertise: it sets the rules that must be followed for this or that
problem, theory or object to emerge and be named, analysed and eventually
transformed into a policy or a plan.
Describing the discourse of development as not merely an ideology that has little to
do with the real world, Escobar points to the importance of analysing the impact of
development discourse at local level: the development discourse has crystallized in
practices that contribute to regulating the everyday goings and comings of people in the
Third World (ibid, p. 104). As his de nition of discourse suggestsnot the expression
of thought: it is a practice, with conditions, rules and historical transformations (ibid,
p. 216)we need to turn our attention to analysing what development (and educational)
institutions actually do and how different groups of people participate in these dis-
courses.
Although Escobar has been criticized for being too negative about development yet
suggesting no alternative (see Gardner & Lewis, 1996; Grillo, 1997), I have found his
theoretical framework provides a way of analysing not just what went wrong, but how
the dominant development discourse could be in uenced by a wider range of partici-
pants. This links to earlier critiques of Foucaults binary structures (possessing power
 Development as Discourse 317

versus being powerless, Mohanty 1991, p. 71) which were said to result in a limited
course of action, a world in which passivity or refusal represent the only possible
choices. Resistance rather than transformation dominates his thinking and consequently
limits his politics (Hartsock, 1990, p. 167). Moving away from binary oppositions
where, for example, groups of people are categorized as developers or developed (as
Escobar tends to do), I feel that the concept of development as discourse allows us to
analyse when individuals move between these positions and the wide range of strategies
they adopt. For example, a Nepali development worker may position herself as a
developer (and powerful) in the local village context, but see herself as the developed
within global development debates. I will attempt throughout this paper to resist the
tendency to essentialize about the developers and developed or the dominating discourse,
to bring out these contradictions.
In the remainder of this paper, I will look at the strengths and weaknesses of applying
the concept of development discourse in the context of my educational research in Nepal.

Development as Discourse: applying the concept in practice

A Song for Education Day
Change is coming because of more progress in education
It is education that opens our eyes within
Through education is the only way for the illiterate to speak out
Change is coming because of more progress in education
It would be so nice to have studied at school
We spent our lives pounding and grinding grain, collecting rewood and
fodder
Change is coming because of more progress in education
At last when Save and Care came, our eyes were opened
Through this important education, we were able to write our names
Change is coming because of more progress in education
We could also write letters by ourselves to our husbands
We could read letters from abroad by ourselves
Education is this curious light of development
It is fathers and mothers fault for not sending us to the village school.
[Source: written by Chameli Ghimre, recorded in eldnotes, 22/2/96, Thumi,
Nepal]
This song was written by Chameli Ghimre, a young woman living in a remote area of
Western Nepal where I was based. Chameli had attended literacy classes run by the
American agency, Save, and composed this song for Education Day, a festival when
local schools and adult literacy groups joined together for processions and a concert. At
rst glance, Chamelis song appears to echo the kind of messages put across in the ip
chart analysed earlier: education is the light of development, women cannot be devel-
oped without literacy. As a text, the song seems clearly in uenced by the dominant
development discourse controlled by the aid agencies working in the local area.
However, when seen in the wider context of Chamelis own life, the text takes on a
different meaning. Chameli was in fact educated at school up to the age of 16 when she
had an arranged marriage and was forced to go to live with her ageing parents-in-law.
318 A. Robinson-Pant

Her husband remained studying at school, whereas she had to do all the domestic and
farm work at home. The adult literacy class, held in the evenings, provided the only
opportunity to continue her studies. Once seen in this light, the statements it would have
been so nice to study at school take on a different meaning: Chameli did study at school,
but even so, education did not lead away from a life of pounding rice and domestic
servitude. Chamelis song thus illustrates the danger of treating discourse simply at the
level of text, without relating the linguistic analysis to the wider analysis of development
discourse as around social practices (Chamelis actual life experiences).

Development Discourses or the Development Discourse?

To think of the discourse of development is far too limiting. (Grillo, 1997,
p. 21)

There can be a tendency to assume that there is one development discourse, to see
development as a monolithic enterprise (ibid, p. 20), as Escobar is often criticized for
doing. Key to my analysis of Chamelis song is the concept of discourses in the plural.
It is tempting to suggest that the song belongs to the development discourse, but what
I am actually identifying above is a number of overlapping and contradictory discourses.
Chameli neither supports nor contradicts the dominant discourse, that education is key
to development, though her song appears to do the former. What is interesting is how
local discourses of development overlap and draw on internationally produced dis-
courses, such as the link between literacy and development. The metaphor Chameli uses
of education bringing light, the literate being able to see, is common in much
development literature (Robinson-Pant, 2000b).
For many authors, however, a wish to specify the development discourse or the
discourse of development in some singular fashion remains irresistible (Apthorpe,
1996, p. 168). These attempts to categorize a type of discourse (whether development or
anti-development discourse, local or international) run the risk of oversimplifying and
misrepresenting complex discursive elds. Crush (1995, p. 20) points out that the power
of development is the power to generalize, homogenize, objectify and there is a danger
that building anti-development discourse can do the same. The idea that development
discourses can be taken apart and labelled can thus be as misleading as not using the
concept of discourse at all. In Nepal, for example, Pigg (1992) identi ed the overlapping
of local and international discourses, through the mixture of indigenous/Western con-
cepts of bikas (meaning development) that she found at local level. Our objective in
using the concept of development discourse should thus be to acknowledge this
complexity and focus on the overlapping discourses, rather than essentializing each
discourse.
Hobart (1993) concentrates on the different discourses of development that can be
observed at eld level: apart from the professional discourse of developers and the
discourse of the local people being developed, the national government and its local
of cials commonly also have distinctive powers and forms of enshrined knowledge, with
their concomitant closure (ibid, p. 12). He describes the gap between the neat
rationality of development agencies representations which imagine the world as ordered
or manageable and the actualities of situated social practices (ibid, p. 16). He believes
that the overlap of developers and local discourses does not lead to improved
communication, but to strain on those locals who are involved in both, and to techniques
of evasion, silence and dissimulation (ibid).
 Development as Discourse 319

Villareal (1992, p. 264) similarly discusses how the analysis of development

endeavours cannot avoid an examination of the complex power process and battles over
images and meaning that takes place at the interface between outsiders and local groups.
In my eld research, the concept of development discourses (as opposed to development
discourse) enabled me to focus on everyday events at this interfaceboth inside and
outside the projects set up by aid agenciesin order to analyse development from the
different players perspectives. These were not necessarily formal structured events, such
as meetings or classes, as Villareal stresses: we have to look very closely at the
everyday lives of the actors, explore the small ordinary issues. In this endeavour, we
shall nd no strong visible manifestations of power but small ashes of command.
(ibid). The idea that there are many development discourses to be found in everyday
situations can therefore widen our perspective on what is to be researched and how to
go about it.

Who De nes and In uences the Discourse?

Who can know and according to what rules? (Escobar, 1995b)
Looking at how discourses overlap and the relationships between them leads us to
question how certain discourses become more or less dominant, and to move away from
the assumption that countries (or people) are passive or discourse-less (Apthorpe,
1996). Many writers discuss development discourses in terms of the different groups of
people involved, as Hobart did above. For example, Grillo (1997) distinguishes between
the developers, those being developed and those who resist development, emphasizing
that discourse is a site of struggle. In the literacy classrooms I observed in Nepal, I was
frequently aware of this struggle when students challenged the dominant development
ideology conveyed in the textbooks. The following account from my eldnotes illustrates
one such incident from an adult class I observed run by a local NGO just outside
Kathmandu. The course, linking literacy instruction with health education, was taught by
a local high school girl, Nirmala, who was much younger than the women in her class:
Suddenly the electric light went off and we were plunged into darkness. I
found my torch and Nirmala located some candles and lit them. Rita dug into
her blouse and produced a cigarette and promptly lit it in the ame. They all
started laughing and Indira said, this is the sort of woman you get studying at
adult literacy classes. Rita retorted that it said you shouldnt drink alcohol, it
didnt mention cigarettes who was it, she said, Ram Kumari who had
problems with roksi (alcohol) referring to one of the literacy stories.
Nirmala wrote saruwa rog (communicable disease) on the board and asked
them to write it ve times in their copy books. Rita put her cigarette away and
started to write laboriously. (Fieldnotes: 9/11/95, Tikkathali)
Rita and Indiras sophisticated banter, parodying the characters in the textbook who are
supposed to represent the ideal developed women, is a strong challenge to the dominant
development discourse which represents illiterate women as passive and ignorant. Rather
than engaging with what could be seen as their anti-development discourse, the teacher
chooses to ignore it and focuses on the technical side of reading and writing, copying
the words communicable disease ve times. Time and again I observed scenes like this,
where the women students challenged the development messages given in textbooks or
lectures by experts. In other words, they questioned who can know? (Escobar, ibid). In
320 A. Robinson-Pant

this case, they were ready to listen to Nirmala as teacher, but not as developer. The
usual response of young inexperienced class facilitators like Nirmala was to avoid
confrontation or discussion by treating literacy instruction as a mechanical exercise in
decoding and memorizing letters. In this context, the concept of development as
discourse enabled me to gain greater insight into the teaching approaches used in the
literacy classrooms and the reasons for various educational strategies being promoted.
Fairclough (1992) suggests a similar approach in his guide to discourse analysis, to
focus on moments of crises (cruces), the times when things are going wrong (as above):
such moments of crisis make visible aspects of practices which might normally be
naturalised and therefore dif cult to notice (ibid, p. 230). Though Fairclough is referring
to moments of crisis in a linguistic sense (even on a micro level when a sentence
structure is broken unexpectedly), I extended the concept to actual events or actions
observed which enabled me to analyse the interface between developers and developed.
On one occasion, I witnessed a low caste woman, Lurimaya, being thrown out of a
womens group by a member of the NGO staff and the other women, because she had
not attended literacy classes regularly. Her response was to challenge the agency staff,
shouting, I dont need a literacy class, Ive already been alone to Kathmandu three
times; in other words, she was already developed in terms of independence and
mobility (Kathmandu was two days journey from her village). Through this crisis, I
gained an insight into how local women viewed and reacted to the dominant develop-
ment discourse, which was in uenced by the American agency working in the area. Who
were the developers in this contextAmerican policy makers, Nepali development
workers from Kathmandu or even the other women in the literacy class who sided
against Lurimaya? Were the developed those who participated in literacy programmes
or women like Lurimaya who chose to struggle alone? It also made me question what
the term drop-outused so often in relation to schools and literacy classesreally
means.

Who and What is Included/Excluded by the Discourse?

Turning to development texts, such as policy documents or eld reports, we can use
linguistic methods of discourse analysis to investigate what is included or excluded by
development discourse. Apthorpe (1996), for example, focuses his analysis not on
development practices or events such as I described above, but on the ways in which
writing about development has been constrained by the dominant discourse. He explores
the ways in which development is constructed as a discourse in terms of framing and
naming, drawing on Schons de nition: things are selected for attention and named in
such a way as to t the frame constructed for the situation (ibid, p. 23). Apthorpe argues
that this is an approach for analysing what is excluded or included by the discourse:
Rival ways of naming and framing set policy agendas differently. For example,
economistic writing on development aid and poverty alleviation tends not to cover the
situations of political and economic refugees and other disaster-displaced people; they
are treated under separate headings as emergencies calling for relief (ibid, p. 24).
Applying Apthorpes approach to actual texts, it becomes more clear how the
dominant development discourses can in uence the way in which development is written
about, and also how the developers actually carry out their jobs. An example is shown
in Fig. 2, a project proposal prepared by Nepali NGO staff based in a remote area of
Nepal to present to a funding agency in Kathmandu.
I was approached by the staff to help with this proposal as it was in English. During
 Development as Discourse 321

These projects will focus on women, children and primary teachers. A total of 1000 mothers, 500 children
and 15 teachers are included as the major target groups/bene ciaries. Globally, women and children are
the key resources of development . Women are playing a vital role in generating the whole human race.
But their condition is very poor. In the context of Nepal, only 25% female are literate and 27% primary
students pass the primary level. Women spend on average 16 hours of their day in their domestic work
and other jobs. They do not get even a minute to think about themselves. Women are traditionally backward
in the community and depressed by the male members of the household . Early morning to late night they
have to work for the husband, children, animals and also manage to feed them all. Sometimes they have
to leave the kitchen without eating anything themselves .
In these two VDCs [village development committees], women are spending their lives in a doubly worse
condition than the above given case . On average 90% of the total children are spending their lives on
the back side of education. So there is no discrimination in education (sondaughter ) because both are
engaged in domestic work. Very early in life, a 10/12 aged girl cant managed her health and dress how
we can think good care will be taken of the baby will be borned [sic]. Children grow up in the cradle alone.
In this areas some mothers leave their children tied by a rope to the house pillar. Approximately 5/6 are
borned [sic] from a single mother. As per the studies of these areas mother and children are mentally and
physically depressed .
Considering all these problems, ECD program is proposed in Manbu and Thumi VDCs, by setting the
following objectives:
1. To make aware on social discrimination (sondaughter, early marriage).
2. To provide skill of child rearing and caring in rural context.
3. To give practical skill of health and sanitation.
4. To train primary teachers on ECD.

Action Plan: considering all the problems of these VDCs and technical overview on the ECD activities,
the following action plan has been prepared .

Date of Duration of Responsible

Sn Description of activities implementation activities person Remarks

1 Site selection/meeting, March/April 10 days SC/US

orientation of each activity education
productivity

2 Pre-test previous condition May 1 week

3 Facilitator training May last 1 week

4 Child to child class June/July 1 month

5 Parenting education class June/July 2 months

6 Primary teachers training on May 5 days

ECD

7 Impact study of the programme August 1 week

(Source: Gandhari and Tiwari, 1996)

FIG. 2. A project proposal for an Early Childhood Developmen t programme in Gorkha District, Nepal.

the process of working together, I was made aware of how they were struggling to put
their ideas and experiences of working in such dif cult conditions into a form that was
considered appropriate within the dominant aid agency discourse. In the text, this comes
across as a tension between the macro level statements and statistics (e.g. on the context
322 A. Robinson-Pant

of Nepal, only 25% of female are literate) and the more intimate knowledge they have
gained through personal experience (often expressed in less correct English, like a
10/12 aged girl cant managed her health and dress how can we think good care will be
taken of the baby will be borned). The staff had a lot of information from rst hand
observation, such as the child being tied by a rope to a pillar, yet they felt that this was
not as important to emphasize as the rather dubious statistics (90% of children
uneducated). This text illustrates how framing in uenced the kind of information and
research carried outtending towards statistical rather than ethnographic data. The
way staff thought about problems was also constrained by dividing people into educated/
uneducated, backward/developed. Activities had to be planned rather mechanistically (as
in the table), with a xed duration and starting date. As I discovered when the beginning
of the literacy course clashed with the peak harvest time, staff had little exibility to
change their written plans and felt their priority was to keep to the proposed schedule.
The proposed project activities were in uenced strongly by the aid agencys model of
development. Staff explained to me that they could not simply start a child care facility
(which they saw as the solution to child neglect), but must rst hold an awareness-raising
campaign and education for parents. Action, they explained, must always be preceded by
pre-testing and awareness raising. Within the dominant development discourse, problems
to do with women and children were framed in terms of health and lack of education
(backward), though the staff intuitively felt that lack of income security and womens
unequal status within the household were the real problems. They felt that they had to
present the solution as a health education programme in order to ensure funding,
suggesting that inadequate child care was a question of poor technical know-how, rather
than directly addressing the ideological issues. Thus the framing of this project proposal
in uenced what had not been talked about, what had been excluded by the discourse.
Naming is another way of determining what can be included in the debate and
establishing power relationships. Escobar (1995a) points to the pervasive use of labels
by the development discourse in the form of client categories and target groups, such
as small farmers, pregnant women0 Labels are by no means neutral; they embody
concrete relationships of power and in uence the categories with which we think and
act (ibid, p. 109). In this proposal, the target group was de ned as mothers, children and
teachers and the identi cation of women as illiterate, backward and depressed in uenced
both the kind of activities proposed and the relationship of staff with the target group as
bene ciaries. The proposed awareness raising on social discrimination (around the
dangers of early marriage and girls lack of opportunities) was signi cantly targeted at
women, rather than at the men of the community. The assumption was that womens low
status and depressed condition was due to their lack of education and awareness.
There is also no sense in the proposal of the differences between various groups of
women (particularly between high and low caste women) since the name women
suggests a uniform problem and solution. As Rathgeber (1995, p. 219) points out, issues
of power relationships between men and women and across social and ethnic groupings
are rarely considered to be appropriate arenas for donor intervention.
My detailed analysis of this funding proposal has illustrated how the concepts of
naming and framing can enable us to identify what has been excluded or included by the
discourse. In this case, the discourse greatly in uenced the content of the programme
proposed and the relationships between development workers and local communities.
What I have not done so far is to discuss the purpose of this analysis, which is perhaps
the main reason why the concept of development as discourse has proved so contro-
versial (see Gardner & Lewis, 1996; Grillo, 1997). Is there any point dissecting events
 Development as Discourse 323

or texts in order to highlight the in uence of the dominant discourse if it stops at this?
Whilst Escobar, Crush et al. talk about alternative discourses, they have all spent more
time attacking the dominant discourse than exploring alternatives and given less attention
to analysing how discourses might change. Development as discourse has been viewed
as a critical tool, but necessarily as a constructive approach, perhaps because of the
assumption that resistance or refusal represent the only possible choices (Hartsock,
1990, p. 167). What is most problematic, it seems to me, is how to use development
discourse as a tool in evaluation. Much of the literature tends to document and identify
differing development discourses, but refrains from making direct judgements about
what is good or bad (in contrast with more economistic readings of discourse). There
is however a danger in simply standing back and critiquing development from a
discourse angle: after identifying overlapping, con icting discourses, one is tempted to
askso what? As Gee (1999, p. 8) emphasizes continually, discourse analysis must
have a point. The answer perhaps lies in identifying and supporting changes already
taking place in development discourses.

Changing Development Discourses

boundaries between and within discourses are constantly shifting. (Fair-
clough, 1995, p. 12)

new forms of discourse, new voices, and new rules of the development
game are emerging. (Porter, 1995, p. 65)

Discourses are never static, but constantly changing and the challenge for those working
in education and development is how to ensure that new voices like Lurimayas, have
the opportunity to in uence development discourse. I have so far been talking about
discourse as a tool for those working in development, speci cally at eld level. The
implication of the analysis so far is that by deconstructing development discourses, new
relationships between developer and developed can be initiated: how developers con-
struct the poor, for example, not only affects the kind of interventions provided but
how eld level staff interact with these groups of people. However, development as
discourse could also become a tool for communities themselves to evaluate aid
interventions and demand accountability, as Porter (1995, p. 63) suggests:

What has discourse analysis to offer our understanding and practice of

development? One easy response is that in a eld so characterized by rhetoric
and persuasion, critical awareness of ideological processes in discourse is
essential. At a minimum it ensures that aspiring development workers are more
aware of their own practices. At best it enables those eventually af icted by
their services critically to con rm the ideological investments they are in-
evitably being persuaded to make in development.

Discourse analysis, in Porters view, can have an ethical and practical function.
Deconstructing discourses can lead to new ways of writing, thinking and even practising
development. Commentators differ on how far they aim at changing simply the kind of
texts produced, or also include other practices associated with development. Seeing
discourse analysis in terms of textual analysis, Crush (1995, p. 18) asks, is there a way
of writing beyond the language of development? Escobar (1995b, p. 222) puts more
emphasis on the Foucaultian de nition of discourse: what kinds of critical thought and
324 A. Robinson-Pant

social practice might lead to thinking about Third World reality differently? Can the
hegemonic discourses of developmentinscribed in multiple forms of knowledge,
political technologies and social relationsbe signi cantly modi ed? For Escobar, the
ways of changing dominant dicourses lie in bottom-up grassroots social movements and
the new forms of knowledge they generate. For Crush, the changes envisaged are more
around the ways we speak and write about development: emancipatory reading which
enables us to analyse how subjects like the third world or womens development have
been shaped by the dominant discourses.
Development discourse is above all ideological and political, so there is a limit to how
far emancipation or power over discourse (Wodak, 1996) can come through changing
the language of development alone (as Crush suggests). Wodak usefully de nes the
limits of such textual discourse analysis, referring to her study which included analysis
of doctorpatient interactions in an Austrian hospital:
the results of our studies are important in many ways. First, they make
transparent inequality and domination. Secondly, they enable us to propose
possibilities of change. And, thirdly, they show the limits of possible emanci-
pation through new patterns of discourse alone. (ibid, p. 32)
Transposed to a development context, Wodaks comments suggest that though develop-
ment staff can change the way they interact with villagers, just changing the language
of development or of developers cannot alter the underlying structural inequalities.
Though, for example, small NGOs may now have more opportunity to in uence the
World Banks discourse, the World Bank still ultimately determines the dominant
discourse, due to its key economic role. However, this is not to deny that discourse
within the World Bank has been in uenced recently by a wider range of discourses,
notably that of Participatory Rural Appraisal (see Holland, 1998)though some may
argue conversely that participatory development practitioners have been co-opted by the
Bank. On a personal level, I feel that I have become more self-critical as a development
worker and researcher, through beginning to analyse the discourses in which I partici-
pate. I have also learnt the importance of being open about where I am coming from,
when establishing relationships with donor agencies, other development agencies and
communitiesnot taking it for granted that we necessarily share a common perspective
on development.
This section has explored the ways in which the concept of development as discourse
can enable us (both developers and developed) to adopt a more critical perspective on
development interventions. To use the concept creatively involves: being aware of many
overlapping, rather than one, development discourse, exploring what is included (and
how) and excluded by certain discourses, who in uences a discourse and above all,
analysing how and why discourses can change. I showed how in my own research in
Nepal, I was able to avoid generalizing what development was even at the local level
as the concept was so contested, according to gender, age, ethnicity and income group.
Speci c concepts, such as moments of crisis, development metaphors, framing and
naming, proved useful for analysing my transcriptions of meetings, classes and develop-
ment texts. I saw the use of development as discourse in very practical terms, such as
improving effectiveness of interventions through understanding the participants views of
development and education and encouraging re exivity about my own role as developer.
It could however be argued that the above account is very much from my own
perspective as a developer. Development discourse enabled me to identify local com-
munities resistance to certain development interventions (for example, dropping out of
 Development as Discourse 325

literacy classes); but what practical use was the concept to the people themselves in
developing practical strategies for the bottom-up mobilization suggested by Escobar? In
this sense, I can see clear parallels with the critiques of Freire, which suggest that his
writing does not explain precisely how critical literacy and awareness leads to social
action: One seeks in vain through Freires work for a clear exegesis of the dynamics
whereby re ection leads to action, conscientisation is party to praxis (Prinsloo, 1987,
p. 18). Freires approach tends now to have more in uence as a teaching method, within
the bounds of the classroom, than in a wider political context. In this respect, perhaps
development as discourselike Freires critical approach to literacycould also be seen
as more valuable to those involved in planning and implementation, than to those
communities who might be directly involved in social action. The concept can provide
those involved in development with greater insight into the dynamics of power and
knowledge at both eld and policy level, but may not in itself provide a direct solution
for those suffering from inequality and poverty (often referred to as empowerment).

What Relevance to Education?

Although I have so far talked about development as discourse largely in terms of my
own experience as a Northern researcher, this paper is intended to open up the concept
for those working in other elds of international education, such as planning, training
and policy formulation. All those involved in education in the South share a common
experience of swimming in development, but everyone may not yet have had the
opportunity to get out and gaze at that sea, to examine our assumptions as developers!
I have discussed in relation to my role as a Northern researcher, how methods of
discourse analysis enabled me to explore the interface between developer and developed,
going beneath the surface of texts like development proposals and practices around
conducting group meetings. Analysing development as discourse, above all, caused me
to ask new questions, to de ne my own ideological perspective (particularly on
feminism) and seek new ways of researching and analysing data. When writing up
research and agency reports, I began to develop ways of placing myself in the text (as
narrator and actor) as well as those people and groups whom I described. I found this
dif cult at rst, given the impersonal style of most aid agency reports, and was surprised
when my colleagues actually welcomed my different kind of account.
Applying the concept of development as discourse to the wider context of educational
planning and policy, we can begin to focus more on the political agenda of various
development players. Rather than seeing planning as a technical eld, we acknowledge
the ideological dimensionthe in uences on how policy is formulated, how policy is
transformed into plans and how plans translate into action on the ground. Analysing
policy in terms of discourse can lead us to ask different questions in place of the usual,
why has this policy failed? For example, given the current policy emphasis on
diversity, we might ask: why has diversity become a dominant discourse in educational
policy? (Rogers, 2000a). How is the discourse represented? Who has in uenced this
discourse? What is the relation between this discourse and others, between local and
international discourses? Where do the major donors stand in relation to this discourse?
By addressing these questions, we begin to deconstruct a dominant discourse and explore
the in uences on current educational policy. Diversity emerges (like development) as
a concept that is often contested: just as globalisation and centralisation may induce its
own reaction (increasing diversity), so increasing diversity may create its own reaction
(increasing pressures for conformity or at least for regulation of diversity) (Rogers,
2000b).
326 A. Robinson-Pant

Turning to speci c educational programmes and strategies, we can analyse how far
educational programmes are shaped by various discourses of development. Drawing on
theories of education, reproduction and change (Bernstein 1971; Bowles, 1980; Sim-
mons, 1980), literacy programmes, for example, can be regarded as conveying and being
shaped by certain development ideologies. Given this new perspective, so-called techni-
cal aspects, such as the language of instruction, can be seen as ideological issues. Once
English is viewed in the context of the modernization discourse of development, the
decision as to whether Bangladeshi adults should be taught in Bengali, Sylheti or English
becomes an ideological choice, as well as a question of which language is most used,
readily understood, etc. (Street, 1999). Planners can then begin to analyse how issues
about language policy and language choices at classroom level are in uenced by
dominant discourses. As I discussed earlier, concepts like drop out need to be seen in
the light of such discussions about language policy: children and adults may drop out
from programmes when they oppose the dominant discourse and feel their perspectives
are not acknowledged, a common form of resistance.
In training contexts, we may observe a mixture of teaching approaches in practice,
though all are labelled functional literacy. What does it mean to label educational
approaches? Analysing the approaches in terms of discourse, we begin to ask whether
it is simply a question of setting up hierarchical relationships (for example, non-formal
education versus formal) or whether the labels (Freirean, functional, etc.) really have
another function? How do individual trainers and groups of learners in uence what
labels such as Freirean or REFLECT [4] mean in practice? Again, using development
as discourse as an analytical tool in training sessions enables the ideological dimension
of teaching methods and materials to be explored. Development offers an ideological
perspective on educational interventions similar to gender and the gender analysis of
materials and classroom situations that is already commonplace in many Northern
institutions.
The concept of development as discourse can thus broaden our perspectives as
educationalists to consider the in uence of development ideologies on our roles as
developers and on the perspectives of those being developed. As well as considering
teaching approaches, language of instruction and methods of school organization in
terms of technical effectiveness, we need to be aware of how development discourses
have shaped and in uenced these practices. Only when such educational policies, plans
and practices are examined from this ideological perspective, can they begin to be a
force for positive change.

Acknowledgements
This paper is based on a presentation given at the Uppingham Seminar (February 2000,
convened by Alan Rogers) on the Implications of Increasing Diversity in Developing
Countries. I learnt much from our informal and wide-ranging discussions on develop-
ment as discourse which is re ected here. I would also like to thank colleagues from
Save USA and Phects projects in Nepal, who contributed to eld research drawn upon
in this paper. The Economic and Social Research Council funded the research in Nepal.

Correspondence: Anna Robinson-Pant, Centre for Applied Research in Education,

School of Education and Professional Development, University of East Anglia, Norwich
NR4 7TJ, UK; e-mail: a.robinson-pant@uea.ac.uk
 Development as Discourse 327

NOTES
[1] Although my own position was more complex in fact, as I was also seen by local people as the wife of
a Brahmin from the West of Nepalwhich brought up contradictions (commented on by many women)
between my role as in uential Western researcher and as a Nepali daughter-in-law !
[2] I am using Hobarts terms developer (meaning both Northern and Southern developmen t workers) and
developed (referring to the local target communities): Hobart, M. (1993) An Anthropologica l Critique
of Development: the growth of ignorance (London, Routledge).
[3] Participatory Rural Appraisal: an approach to development planning based on action research by and with
local people, using visual methods such as mapping and diagramming.
[4] Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques, an approach to adult
literacy teaching pioneered in the 1990s by ActionAid, a British NGO.

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