Resilience is a key buzzword in international development planning. Resilience is often seen as “a new development paradigm” that follows decolonial impulses and brings local knowledge to the fore in order to better address environmental issues. International policy programs increasingly believe that goals can be better achieved through the integration of traditional, local or indigenous knowledge practices. Local communities and traditional knowledge practices are also often seen as dependent on understandings that are more natural, relevant, and grounded in harmonious coexisting cultures. Indigenous approaches are considered to be based on a deep ecology of reciprocal care that is critical to sustainability. In this way, analyzes of international development projects in the policy and academic literature often tend to establish binaries of colonial and decolonial; perceptions of acquisition and extraction and perceptions of care and mutuality; anthropocentric understandings and multispecies or transcendent human understanding. Such an approach risks explaining policy failure in a language of colonial imposition and decolonial resistance that focuses primarily on cultural and epistemological conflicts.
Last week, I attended the Decolonizing Resilience workshop at the University of Ghana, Accra, and I was struck by how this binary, potentially essentializing framework was challenged by those in the room. Clearly, the turn to local knowledge may also involve a different kind of knowledge, one that does not rely on any epistemological breakthrough, alternative modes of knowing, or cultural difference, but rather on pragmatism and common sense. Attention to the constraints of external development projects is often based not on different cultural understandings but on the importance of context, that is, on material understandings of the differences that difference makes. The Martinican poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant called this phenomenon “opacity” – the reality that reality cannot be easily grasped or captured in a reductionist and abstract way. This is particularly important in countries in the Global South, as societies have not become so homogeneous through the implementation of modern infrastructure and technology – for example, roads, electricity, internet, etc. may be much less reliable. This means that international policy interventions aimed at “empowering” capabilities or empowering communities often backfire, not because of any fixed or traditional cultural understanding, but because of differences in material realities.
For example, international recommendations on organizational frameworks for crop cultivation, crop varieties, and fertilization and harvesting patterns tend to make simplifying assumptions. Reductionist assumptions ignore differences. For example, it would make more sense to plant different varieties in the same spot if the soil varies in amount, is prone to flooding, is uneven, or has a lot of rocks. The assumption of homogeneous land quality is the problem, not cultural differences. Another example might be to assume that faster growing or higher yielding varieties might be desirable, when in fact transport and storage issues mean that length of shelf life is often more important. Sometimes the differences may simply be one of taste and preference, for example when offering a particular variety of chicken is unsuccessful, they are sacrificed rather than kept because they don’t taste as good.
The point being made is that a focus on the colonial/decolonial binary tends to replicate Western approaches to cultural homogenization and reduction. This means that deconstructing Western approaches and then foregrounding ‘local’ or ‘Afrocentric’ knowledges may run the risk of merely replacing one form of reductionism with another. This is where Glissant’s concept of “opacity” may play an important role. His focus is on relationships, but not in some metaphysical, abstract, romanticized and essentialist way, but in a materialistic way, because it is the relational context rather than some essentializing of culture Understanding makes all the difference. For example, the proposed crop varieties and treatments might be favored if better storage and transport facilities were available. If the soil were more uniform and stones removed, a more uniform method of growing crops might be acceptable and so on. From this we can see that opposition to external projects was not necessarily just an opposition to colonialism but also a product of pragmatism. Local knowledge is not necessarily person- or subject-centered.
So far it seems to me that coloniality has been exaggerated as a limitation of international development projects. Nothing could be further from my intentions. My point is that it can be problematic to understand coloniality as a transformation that is highly problematic on a cultural and epistemological level. Decolonization increasingly involves “colonial logic” and ways of thinking. The ‘coloniality of knowledge’ can be understood as just one way of grasping the contemporary importance of coloniality, often together with two other aspects, namely the ‘coloniality of power’ and the ‘coloniality of being’. Today, however, the coloniality of power, let alone the coloniality of existence, is often increasingly excluded. What happens when we pay more attention to them?
Accra’s colleagues emphasized the importance of material relationships rather than ways of thinking. There is no doubt that ongoing coloniality of power, the actual power imbalance between international organizations and local communities. This is why projects usually get off the ground no matter how poorly conceived. Even if locals know that expected results may not be achieved, there is often no incentive to say no to international resources. The colonial nature of power leads to program failure because affected local communities cannot easily be integrated equally – unequal relationships can easily undermine any policy aspirations for a shared approach to problem solving, no matter how much “voice” is given to local communities.
However, perhaps more importantly coloniality of existence, which can be understood as questioning the ontological assumptions of modernity, that is, the assumptions of universal laws, linear causality, and a “one world” of entities with fixed essences in an empty grid of time and space. The coloniality of existence is central to the international governmental imaginary, underpinned by the assumption that policy lessons can be learned and generalized across time and space. Questions of difference, relationship, and context therefore necessarily undermine the legitimacy of external expertise that relies on representation, simplification, and abstraction. The simple empirical examples provided above highlight that the coloniality of presence in the Global South can be a particularly problematic basis for policy assumptions.
Raising the issue of “opacity”, the need to take differences seriously, can provide an unnecessary basis for a decolonial approach that can hold international institutions and external programs to account. The point is that the gap between international development project planning and local reality (i.e. the “opacity” problem) is not always a matter of cultural, epistemological or cosmological differences, which can be resolved by adding some local representatives or consultants . When discussing external project constraints, what is often highlighted is the importance of irreducible differences: differences made by ignoring them. It is “opacity” itself that raises questions about the legitimacy of external development projects for capacity building and implementation. Glissant calls for “opaque rights” that link the frameworks of the coloniality of power and the coloniality of existence without essentializing different “worlds” or cultures. Difference here is not a homogenizing force that enables new institutions of transparency, representation, and reduction. Placing “opacity” at the center of the decolonial agenda may help to hold accountable and problematize external intervention projects, no matter how “favorable” their purposes.
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