Anthropology of development

[3] Some describe the anthropological critique of development as one that pits modernization and an eradication of the indigenous culture, but this is too reductive and not the case with the majority of scholarly work.

In fact, most anthropologists who work in impoverished areas desire the same economic relief for the people they study as policymakers, however they are wary about the assumptions and models on which development interventions are based.

Criticism often focuses therefore on the cultural bias and blind-spots of Western development institutions, or modernization models that: systematically represent non-Western societies as more deficient than the West; erroneously assume that Western modes of production and historical processes are repeatable in all contexts; or that do not take into account hundreds of years of colonial exploitation by the West that has tended to destroy the resources of former colonial society.

He argued that although the burdens of poverty were systemic and therefore imposed upon these members of society, they led to the formation of an autonomous subculture as children were socialized into behaviors and attitudes that perpetuated their inability to escape the underclass.

In sociology and anthropology, the concept created a backlash, pushing scholars to abandon cultural justifications and negative descriptions of poverty, fearing such analysis may be read as "blaming-the-victim.

The model postulates that economic growth occurs in five basic stages, of varying length:[6] As should be clear from the subtitle of his book, Rostow sought to provide a capitalist rebuttal to the unilinear Marxist growth models being pursued in the newly independent communist regimes in the second and third world; an effort that would lead to the "Green revolution" to combat the "Red revolution".

The substantivist approach demonstrated the ways in which economic activities in non-market societies were embedded in other, non-economic social institutions such as kinship, religion and political relations.

Some scholars blame the different agents for having only considered a small aspect of the local people's lives without analyzing broader consequences, while others like dependency theory or Escobar argue that development projects are doomed to failure for the fundamental ways they privilege Western industry and corporations.

Escobar's argument echos the earlier work of dependency theory and follows a larger critique more recently posed by Foucault and other poststructuralists.

Since its creation in 1960, the IDA remains the single largest source of donor funding for social services at a basic level; including health, clean water, sanitation, education, and infrastructure to the world's impoverished nations.

[13] In the 1950s, many of these nations were newly independent from colonial rule, therefore suffering from economic and political instability and an inability to afford development loans on the typical terms offered by the World Bank.

Utilizing the same criteria to evaluate loans as the IBRD facility of the World Bank, the IDA's development regime pursues funding projects that protect the environment and build needed infrastructure.

[13] IDA lending for Fiscal Year 1989 (FY89) totaled at $4.9 billion in credits and broken down by region: 48% to Africa, 44% to Asia, and 8% to Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.

[12] On a major scale, the global development community has been impacted by the IDA, with success rates that compare favorably with both public and private sector investments around the world.

The specific failures lay in the decline in export prices coupled with the emerging restrictions on the import of African goods, done by some of the industrialized countries.

[16] James Ferguson utilized the governmentality framework in "The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho" (1990),[17] the first in many similar explorations.

In the case of Lesotho, its history as a grain exporting region was ignored, as was its current role as a labour reserve for the South African mines.

Not wanting to deal with the apartheid South African regime, development agencies isolated the "independent" Lesotho from the regional economy in which it was entrapped in their project rationales and reports.

Artificially taken out of this larger capitalist context, Lesotho's economy was described as "isolated," "non-market" and "traditional" and thus a proper target for aid intervention.

Any analysis which suggests the roots of poverty lie in areas outside the scope of government are quickly dismissed and discarded since they cannot provide a rationale for state action.

Following Michel Foucault, writing on ecogovernmentality focuses on how government agencies, in combination with producers of expert knowledge, construct "The Environment."

This, not through the imposition of specific outcomes, but by creating frameworks that rationalizes behavior in particular ways and involve individuals in the process of problem definition and intervention.