Rethinking Development outside the Unfolding Myth

The classical conception of development — whether economic, social, or human — is based on a powerful underlying metaphor: developing something that is in some sense “folded” or enveloped. The would-be developers’ task is thus to “unfold” the respective society in order to help it realise the virtuous processes which are already supposedly present but which, due to a lack of resources, have not yet fully come to fruition. There is the suggestion of an enveloped, under-developed state — which contains the embryo of its future unfolded, modern form — with development understood as the linear process that leads from one to the other, in accordance with a preestablished plan (development cooperation). The metaphor further suggests that the advanced societies or “developers” — those implementing and financing the development cooperation projects — experienced this unfolding before the developing societies and, as a result, are particularly well-suited to support societies in the Global South as they undergo the same processes. But is this the correct version of events?

Modern society is a machine that creates folds, not one that flattens them. Modern societies — which the developers present as the fully realised societal model (the “unfolded”) — are in reality marked by folds just as complex, if not more so, than those of the societies they claim to be developing. When it comes to comparing them, the difference is not between the folded and the unfolded but between different regimes of folding. A developed society like Swiss society is not an economy that is unfolded (transparent, rational, optimal); it is an economy enveloped by centuries of history (rurality, migration, the post-war shift to the tertiary sector), complex institutions (work and capital regulations, the social security system, bureaucracy), power dynamics (lobbies, unions, the political system, international treaties), and technologies that are constantly reconfiguring social relations (digital technologies, automation, AI). To continue with the unfolding metaphor, it should be possible to flatten all this complexity to make it transparent, to rationalise it. However, each attempt at simplification (reform, deregulation) only creates new folds, new complexity, new unforeseen effects. Modern society is a machine that creates folds, not one that flattens them.

Development aid can no longer be described as an unfolding (a release of internal potential), but rather as a forced refolding of the societies being aided, through externally imposed forms, norms, and transfers. Aid is a process of deterritorialisation (which undoes historical folds), followed by reterritorialisation — i.e. a refolding into the capitalist mould. Development projects at local institutions in an under-developed country are folds encountering other folds; the result is not development but rather the homogenisation of envelopment — or, in other words, globalisation. Development must be rethought in ways that go beyond the unfolding myth.Development must be rethought in ways that go beyond the unfolding myth. 

Bruno Latour and Amina Shabou observed — writing about the Ivory Coast some 50 years ago — that the relationship between two individuals within the same territory becomes progressively weaker as each of them develops stronger ties with institutions such as the state (and with international institutions). Deterritorialisation is marked by the inhabitants’ inability to say what they lack: this role falls to mediators far away. From that point on, the sense of deprivation intensifies constantly: there is a lack of asphalt, TVs, technicians, social housing, water, space, healthcare… Envelopment in a new territorialisation is complete “when the governed themselves call for more state presence, even more sub-prefectures, supervisors, experts […], and the whole country starts to feel the lack of the city, to seek out the city”. This assessment, made half a century ago, is today no less pertinent than ever. It also opens our ears to Bruno Latour’s more recent call for strategies to address climate change — which we return to below.

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Are we then condemned to abandon the term “development”? Researchers like Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan have suggested replacing it with more precise terms, such as “proactive operations to transform a social environment” that would better indicate the foreign nature of the imposed programmes (programmes which, as we have seen, promote the standardised envelopment of their recipients), allowing us to break with the idea of a society that will eventually — once the aid has achieved its objectives — come to understand its true essence. For our part, we believe that the term can still be used — provided we move away from the idea that it consists in practice of programmed unfoldings, and instead conceive it more as supporting a society’s choices of the external folds with which it seeks to resonate. Recently, despite the reservations voiced by the international community, several Sahelian countries called into question the political system of representative democracy, seeking to restore a degree of political unanimity in order to form a common front in the violent fight against jihadist organisations. Yet, over the span of a century, they had passed through all the various folds of Western-style politics: the abolition of customary chiefs, the shift to a single-party system at independence, the proliferation of representative political parties and decision-making bodies (culminating in a recent multi-level decentralisation), and support for civil society.

Moreover, today’s climate emergency requires adopting new forms of envelopment in both the Global North and the Global South — if the goal is, as Bruno Latour urges, to reterritorialise by laying out clearly what we truly depend on (and what we can do without). In this respect, societies in the Global South may even have an advantage: they have had mediators telling them from a distance what they should desire for much less time than societies in the Global North, where mediation through the state and other intermediaries has replaced most face-to-face relationships. Instead of applying a plan imported from elsewhere, “development” must become the name for this ongoing, uncertain, and inherently political process for creating a common world.