Surviving well together : postdevelopment, maternity care, and the politics of ontological pluralism

Postdevelopment began in the domain of academic critique, a critique sometimes so scathing that it was read as a wholesale rejection of development. In our reading, however, those critiques expressed a disappointment and betrayal felt by those who saw that the development industry (multilateral or bilateral aid, INGOs, and charitable organizations) had been founded on some worthwhile altruistic intention. The intention and the promise of a more equitable world, a global sharing of knowledge and resources, and greater shared well-being were, and remain, worthwhile goals. But from the beginning the industry was mired in the ethnocentrism and arrogance of the ‘First World’, colonial legacies of dispossession and destruction, and the emergence of institutions that would form the bedrock of contemporary global capitalism. In the late 1980s and 1990s, postdevelopment scholars provided a minority voice against the development machine, but never rejected the idea that greater global equity was a worthwhile enterprise (McKinnon 2007; McKinnon 2012). Following these critiques, the next question is how can a global community work towards these goals without reinscribing, and re-performing imperialism? There is not, and never will be, a simple answer to that question. In this chapter we explore some examples of how a critical development scholarship now is moving past a position of critique, into the practice of engaged scholarship as postdevelopment.