Resilience is a buzzword in international development programs. Resilience is often considered “a new paradigm for development”, one that follows a decolonial impulse putting local knowledge at the forefront to enable better solutions to environmental problems. International policy agendas increasingly believe that goals can be better achieved by integrating traditional, local or indigenous knowledge practices. It is also often assumed that the practices of local communities and traditional knowledge are based on more natural, more relational understandings, based on cultures of harmony and coexistence. Indigenous approaches are considered to be based on deep reciprocal ecologies of care crucial for sustainability. Thus, the analysis of international development projects, both in political literature and in academic literature, often tends to establish a binary of colonial and decolonial; the epistemes of acquisition and extraction and those of care and mutuality; understandings that are human-centered and those that are multi-species or more-than-human. This approach then risks interpreting political failure in the language of colonial imposition and decolonial resistance which focuses largely on a shock of cultures and epistemologies.
Attend a workshop on “Decolonizing Resilience” in Accra at the University of Ghana Last week, I was struck by how this binary, and potentially essentializing, framework was challenged by those in the room. It was clear that the use of local knowledge could also imply another type of knowledge, not dependent on any epistemological rupture, alternative ways of knowing or cultural differences, but on pragmatism and common sense. Attention to the limits of external development projects has often been framed not in terms of different cultural understandings, but rather in terms of the importance of context, that is, in terms of the material understanding of difference that makes the difference. Edouard Glissant, Martinican poet and philosopher, calls this “opacity”. – the fact that reality cannot be easily grasped or captured in a reductionist and abstract way. This is particularly important in the Global South, where society has not been as homogenized through the imposition of modern infrastructure and technology – for example, roads, electricity, internet, etc. can be much less reliable. This means that international political interventions, designed to “build” capacity or enable communitiescan often backfire, not because of fixed or traditional cultural conceptions, but because of the material reality of differences.
For example, international advice on agricultural crops in terms of organizational frameworks, crop varieties, and fertilization and harvesting patterns can often make reductionist assumptions. Reductionist assumptions ignore differences. For example, if the soil is variable in quantity, vulnerable to flooding, uneven or has many stones, it makes more sense to plant different varieties in the same place. It is assumptions of homogeneous land quality that are the problem rather than cultural differences. Another example might be the assumption that faster growing or more productive varieties might be desirable when in reality transportation and storage issues mean that shelf life can often be longer. Sometimes the differences can simply be about taste and preference. For example, when the supply of a particular variety of chicken was unsuccessful, they were used for sacrifices rather than preserved, as their taste was not that good.
The point being made is that attention to a binary colonial/decolonial logic tends to reproduce Western approaches to cultural homogenization and reduction. This means that deconstructing Western approaches and then highlighting “local” or “Afro-centric” knowledge risks simply replacing one form of reductionism with another. It is where Glissant’s notion of “opacity” can play an important role. It focuses on relationship, but not in a metaphysical, abstract, romanticized, essentialist way, but rather in a materialist way, in the sense that it is the relational context that makes all the difference rather than an essentialized understanding of the culture. For example, if there were better storage and transportation facilities, then the varieties and processing forms of crops offered could be favored. If the soil were more uniform and the stones were removed, then more uniform planting methods could be accepted and so on. We then see that opposition to external projects is not necessarily only an opposition to coloniality but also the product of pragmatism. Local knowledge is not necessarily less human or subject-centered.
So far, it might seem that I am suggesting that coloniality is overemphasized as a limiting factor in international development projects. Nothing could be further from my intention. My point is that moving to an understanding of coloniality as largely culturally and epistemologically problematic can be problematic. Decolonization has increasingly become a question “colonial logics” and ways of thinking. The “coloniality of knowledge” can be understood as one way among others to grasp the contemporary importance of coloniality, often alongside two other aspects, the “coloniality of power” and the “coloniality of being”. Today, however, the coloniality of power, not to mention the coloniality of being, is increasingly left aside. What happens when we emphasize them more?
Colleagues in Accra emphasized the importance of material relationships rather than ways of thinking. There is no doubt that the situation is ongoing coloniality of power, a real imbalance of power between international organizations and local communities. This is why projects are often carried out on the ground, even if they are poorly designed. Even when local people know that expected results may not be achieved, they often have little incentive to say no to international resources. The coloniality of power leads to the failure of projects because the local communities involved cannot easily be integrated on an equal footing – no matter how much “voice” is given to local communities, relations of inequality can easily undermine any political aspiration towards a shared approach to problem solving. .
But perhaps the most important thing was THE coloniality of being, which can be understood as problematizing the ontological assumptions of modernity, of a “A global world of universal laws, linear causality and entities with fixed essences in an empty grid of time and space. The coloniality of being is at the heart of international governmental imaginaries, based on the assumption that political lessons can be learned and generalized across time and space. For this reason, questions of difference, relation and context necessarily undermine the legitimacy of external expertise, dependent on representation, reduction and abstraction. The simple empirical examples provided above highlight that in the Global South, the coloniality of being can provide a particularly problematic basis for political assumptions.
Raising the problem of “opacity”, the need to take differences seriously, can provide non-essentializing ground for a decolonial approach capable of holding international agencies and external projects to account. The fact is that the gap between the planning of international development projects and the reality on the ground – the problem of “opacity” – is not always necessarily a matter of cultural, epistemological or cosmological differences that can be addressed by addition of some local representatives or advisors. It is often the materiality of irreducible difference that comes to the fore in discussions about the external limits of the project: the neglect of the differences that make the differences. It is “opacity” itself which problematizes the foundations of the legitimization of external development projects for capacity building and empowerment. Glissant’s call for a “right to opacity” thus connects conceptions of the coloniality of power and the coloniality of being without essentializing different “worlds” or cultures. Here, difference is not a homogenizing force, enabling new regimes of transparency, representation and reduction. Placing “opacity” at the center of a decolonial agenda can enable accountability and problematization of external intervention projects, however “empowering” they may be intended to be.
Further reading on international electronic relations
