Surplus possibilities : post-development and community economies

In recent years, development practitioners, anthropologists, geographers and others who are observers ‘on the ground’ of the failures of the one-size-fits-all model of development have begun to generate a ‘post-development’ discourse (Rahnema with Bawtree, 1997). By this, we mean a set of thinking and doing practices that are guided by a distinctive ethical stance. Post-development discourse is aligned with the long leftist tradition of critical analyses that accompanied the global consolidation, immediately after the Second World War, of a hegemonic mainstream development project. But while sharing a dissatisfaction with mainstream development, this emerging post-development discourse effects a radical rupture with a style of thinking that underpins much of the critique of development. In this chapter, we aim to give a taste of how we are broaching the practice of post-development thinking in a linked set of projects – a language project of representing the economy as diverse, a collaboration with an NGO that is involved in what we see as post-development interventions in the global trade in labour and an action research project negotiating post-development pathways in place in a Philippines municipality.