Pluriverse: A Post Development Dictionary

2022-02-26 22:24

  • 'Development' is an idea which emerged out of the post-colonial world. Broadly speaking it's the idea that less developed nations can 'catch up' to the Global North. It equates 'development' to 'progress', and imagines that nations move in a linear fashion along a timeline.
  • There are manifold problems with the idea of 'sustainable development'. Some are:
    • Sustainable development is an oxymoron. Growth requires consumption which requires the use of natural resources.
    • The use of economic growth and GDP as a measure of success places nations in a hierarchy and reinforces the idea of progress as linear
    • It depoliticises decisions that need to be made in order to solve environmental problems, by rendering them as purely technological problems to be solved - rather than a set of alternate futures which have trade offs
  • Things that link the individual ideas within the pluriverse:
    • The idea of human emancipation within nature. Therefore it is not an exercise in cultural relativism, where anything goes.
    • They go to the root of the problem
    • They challenge established notions of development, such as economic growth and productivism