There are various ways to examine development policy, the most common of which – the instrumentalist and the critical view – are complete opposites (Mosse 2005).22 The
instrumentalist approach conceives of policy as a tool for solving development problems and affecting change through rational, technical means: it examines whether development works and what kinds of impacts and results it produces (ibid.). The critical Marxist view perceives development aid, and such related issues as the Washington policy consensus, as forms of imperialism, that is, “as a means of advancing the geopolitical and strategic interests of the governments and international organizations that provide this ‘aid’” (Veltmeyer 2013: 54). The critical Foucauldian approach, on its part, concentrates on showing how policy conceals its true operations – the spread of transnational and state bureaucratic power and Western dominance – in the technical idiom in which policy is portrayed. Furthermore, this perspective asserts that “policies not only impose conditions, as if from ‘outside’ or ‘above’, but influence people’s indigenous norms of conduct so that they themselves contribute, not necessarily consciously, to a government’s model of social order” (Shore and Wright 1997: 5–6). Many ethnographers have been inspired by this line of thinking and have applied it empirically to the study of development policy in the Global South (Ferguson 1994; Ferguson and Gupta 2005; Green 2010; Hale 2002; Li 2007; Ong 2005). They have examined policy from a more empirical perspective, thereby emphasizing their complex and contested nature. This study is situated within this scholarly branch of thinking and research.
Influenced by Li’s (2007) ethnographic work on the relationships between development aid and indigenous peoples23, my study looks at policy through the prism of ‘the practice
of government’. The notion of ‘government’ is here understood as a calculated means of governing and controlling individuals and groups of people in a desired way. Influenced by Foucault’s concept of government, Rose has described it as being constituted by “all those ways of reflecting and acting that have aimed to shape, guide, manage or regulate the conduct of persons…in the light of certain principles or goals” (1996: 41–2). State policy can be reckoned as a form of government through which power is exercised on
22 Although I take here the stance most commonly known within social anthropology, development policy can be studied from various disciplinary points of views, including anthropology, global political economy, political science, and geography (Fforde 2009: 97–103).
23 One may query whether Li’s theoretical frameworks are suitable for the examination of the Bolivian case as she studies Indonesian grassroots indigenous and peasant groups. Due to global indigenous discourses and movements, as well as global neoliberal developments, I believe that there are similarities between indigenous experiences all over the world. Additionally, in the Indonesian case the indigenous term adat (custom) has started to circulate as the key concept in indigenous mobilizations and rights discourses in somewhat similar ways as the notion of vivir bien in the Latin American context (Henley and Davidson 2008; Li 2007; Tsing 2005). The article “In the Name of Adat: Regional Perspectives on Reform, Tradition, and Democracy in Indonesia”, by Henley and Davidson (2008), has inspired the title of my study.
individuals and groups of people. Paramount in this is the ‘will to improve’ (Li 2007); the idea of improvement and positive social change. The moral attributes often affiliated with international development aid fit well with the idea that “government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth” (Foucault 1991: 100). Development aid as a form of government appears as an assemblage that articulates ways of doing good. Through it, ‘positive’ forms of power are exercised. The ‘positive’ here does not imply positive development outcomes or impacts (in whatever way such success would be measured), but rather that it does not require the use of force or violence.
‘Government’ in Foucault’s sense did not refer to the state as a coherent and well- bound entity, and certainly not to specific governing regimes as sources of power, but rather to a conglomeration of techniques of power that circulate within the sphere of the state. The forms and effects of state power were rather to be understood in a more subtle way than as a form of coercion clearly identifiable to specific individual authorities or institutional or economic structures, such as bureaucracy or a capitalist economic system. Power appeared to be everywhere, because “conceived in terms of its methods and its object, rather than its institutional forms, government is a broader process than the relatively unified and functionalist entity suggested by the notion of the state” (Mitchell 1999: 88).
Foucault used the term ‘government’ in another sense as well. In this understanding, the notion of government was given the additional implication of a political rationality of how to rule and to govern; that is, governmentality (Gordon 1991: 7). Governmentality referred to the “ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this…complex form of power” (Foucault 1991: 102). It was, according to Foucault (1991), a typical form of political rationality for liberal Western states where ‘governmentalization’ of the state started to bypass other forms of power and rule.
What, in Rose’s (1996) opinion, makes (indigenous) policy goals or principles governmental, rather than merely conceptual or theoretical, is the aim of their becoming practice. What Li (2007) calls ‘the practice of government’ occurs through the translation of government into technical exercise through concrete bureaucratic programs and projects. This requires two key elements: first, the identification of a problem or a negative state of affairs that needs to be corrected; and second, an affirmation of what Li calls ‘rendering technical’, which “confirms expertise and constitutes the boundary between those who are positioned as trustees, with the capacity to diagnose deficiencies in others, and those who are subject to expert directions” (2007: 7). Important in the practice of government is the role of technical experts as knowledge brokers and gatekeepers of “truth”. Their role has been fundamental in the institutionalization of forms that govern and control individuals and groups of people, because “political rule would not itself
set out the norms of individual conduct, but would install and empower a variety of ‘professionals’, investing them with authority to act as experts in the devices of social rule” (Rose 1996: 40).
In addition to expert regimes, governmentality functions when individuals themselves formulate a type of authority. While the “government of subjectivity has taken shape through the proliferation of a complex and heterogeneous assemblage of technologies” (Rose 1990: 213), governing has become “something we do to ourselves, not something done to us by those in power” (Cruikshank 1996: 235). A key to understanding governmentality, therefore, lies in the merging of outside means of governing and controlling with internal processes through which individuals become self-disciplined and self-controlling (Kaisto and Pyykkönen 2010). Consequently, governing is both internalized and present in external – economic, political, and institutional – structures (Mitchell 1999). Rather than leaning on discipline and force, Hardt and Negri (2000: 23) define this as the emergence of the ‘society of control’. According to them, its main characteristic is that:
[M]echanisms of control become ever more ‘democratic’, ever more immanent to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens. The behaviours of social integration and exclusion proper to rule are thus increasingly interiorized within the subjects themselves.
With this formulation, Hardt and Negri refer to the idea that at the moment when power starts to overtake every aspect of human life (the condition to which Foucault [2000] referred to with the term ‘biopower’ or ‘biopolitics’), it “reveals a new context, a new milieu of maximum plurality…” (2000: 25). Because Bolivian state transformation through indigenous ideas is so recent, it would be difficult, although, of course, very important, to examine the kinds of biopolitical capacities that it might portray. While biopower and biopolitics are not the focus of this study, this line of thinking offers an optic for the study of the potentialities of democratization that new forms of (indigenous) government might open up. This internalization of decolonization, or becoming a decolonial subject, came up, for example, in the story of the domestic worker at the beginning of this study. Rather than looking at self-disciplinary operations among the so-called objects of ‘government’, I will shed light on the creation, and creators, of new forms of ‘government’ in a situation of major paradigm shift.
During the Washington Consensus era, the role of global and local actors in shaping the lives of individuals and groups in the Global South has been significantly enhanced, while the role of the state, on the contrary, has been in many ways challenged. In the case of many aid-dependent countries the practice of government operates through IFIs, international development agencies and NGOs. Fraser has suggested that in the age of ‘postindustrial society’ or ‘neoliberal globalization’, the question we have to ask is
“how does power operate after the decentering of the national frame” (2003: 170)? She argued that Foucault’s theorizations of governmentality were intimately linked with the specific historical moment of “the fordist mode of social regulation…at the zenith of the postwar Keynesian welfare state” (2003: 160). This study departs from the assumption that especially since the increasing spread of global free market principles and universal development paradigms, international development aid has functioned as a mechanism that produces government and control in many countries of the Global South including Bolivia.
In the name of ‘doing good’, principles and goals have been spread that, as Postero noted in the case of Bolivia, “rather than opening up opportunities [have] foreclosed options” (2010: 70). The phenomenon that Ferguson and Gupta (2005) call ‘neoliberal governmentality’, changed the nature of the Bolivian nation-state from a corporatist and centralized agent of productive forces to an outsourced government. Neoliberal governmentality functions through “all the processes by which the conduct of a population is governed: by institutions and agencies, including the state; by discourses, norms, and identities; and by self regulation, techniques for the disciplining and care of the self” (Ferguson and Gupta 2005: 114). One of the main characteristics of neoliberal ‘will to improve’ present in IFIs and international development agencies is their “increasing reliance on dispersed and marketized modes of governmentality” (Fraser 2003: 167). Hale (2002: 495) has explained the difference in these forms of governing in the following way:
While both the neoliberal doctrine and its ‘classical’ predecessor place primary emphasis on the individual as the source of rational action, and the individualised logic of the market as guarantor of the social good, they diverge sharply in the proposed modality of governance. Under classic liberalism, state interventions ostensibly are intended to ‘free’ the individual; in effect, they produce forms of consciousness that lead citizen-subjects to govern themselves in the name of freedoms won and responsibilities acquired. The neoliberal model, in contrast, puts forth a critique of this state intervention, and the social welfare state that it eventually spawned; its proponent argue for a reactivation of individual initiative, responsibility and ethical rectitude through other means.
Economic and development policy initiatives were crucial in introducing these “new forms of political-economic governance premised on the extension of market relationships” (Larner 2000: 5). After all, policies are major instruments of governance as Shore and Wright (1997) have aptly noted. In addition, Larner has suggested that while “neo-liberalism may mean less government, it does not follow that there is less governance” (2000: 12). Indeed, she continues that, “while on the one hand neo-liberalism problematizes the state and is concerned to specify its limits through the invocation of individual choice, on the other hand it involves forms of governance that encourage both institutions and individuals to conform to the norms of the market” (ibid.: 12). The corollary of this argument is that the development policy and practice exercised in
many of the poorest countries in the Global South have been intimately involved in the tightening of global capitalist political economy.
Consequently, the point of departure here is that while policy in the Global South manifests and enhances neocolonial dependency relations and imperialist exploitation (Veltmeyer 2013), it extends beyond that. It is an assemblage, and as such “heterogeneous, contingent, unstable, partial and situated” (Collier and Ong 2005: 12), that produces and articulates diverse forms of power and governance. It does not work solely through unidirectional domination and exploitation, but in myriad, complex ways through both external and internal processes; and, as a result, it has variety of effects and unexpected consequences.