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Email articleA recent issue of Foreign Policy analyzed a variety of formerly well-established but now defunct theories, such as the limits to growth theory and the theory of the military-industrial complex. One such ostensible has-been is dependency theory, a prominent dissent from the dominant modernization paradigm that served as a blueprint for development in the post-World War II period. In opposition to dependency theory, economist Andres Velasco argues that declining terms of trade, as well as recommendations for delinking from the world economy, were always shibboleths uttered mostly by Western radicals anyway. "Latin American governments," he writes, "are persevering with integration, as they cut tariffs and sign regional agreements in spite of the global recession." Velasco is arguing from the perspective of modernization theory, although he would no doubt disagree with the label. His implicit claim is that modernization has triumphed over dependency theory in its prescriptions for development. In fact, many of the debates about globalization are avatars of long-standing disagreements between modernization and dependency theorists.
In my 1995 book, Gender and Development: Rethinking Modernization and Dependency Theory, I analyzed assumptions about gender in these two theories and made the case that the poles of modernization and dependency theory continue to ground most development debates. It is easy to make connections, for example, between economic historian Walt Rostow and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and between political economist Samir Amin's analysis of the peripheral economy and author Naomi Klein's analysis of export processing zones in No Logo. While modernization, development, and dependency are somewhat nostalgic terms, they are hardly passé as influential theoretical frameworks for understanding post-World War II global developments. While modernization and development have been superseded by much celebratory rhetoric about globalization, and dependency theory has been superseded by analysis of the new imperialism, there are important connections, continuities, and differences between what the terms meant two decades ago and what they mean today. This linkage translates into a relative stagnation in the understanding of gender and its workings in the modern context.
The analysis of gender, modernization, and development was transformed considerably in the 1990s, by the influence of both postmodern/postcolonial theory and increasingly complex empirical work on globalization. Professor Edward Said's contributions to post-colonial theory, along with the emerging recognition of the binary oppositions that support development theory, eventually deconstructed the Western foundations of development discourse. For example, decades after Said argued that "to have such knowledge of [the Orient] is to dominate it," mid-1990s works by political scientists Jonathan Crush, Wolfgang Sachs, David Moore, and Gerald Schmitz were dedicated to understanding how contemporary discourses of development normalized post-World War II versions of European Orientalism. Moore outlined the ambitions of the deconstructive task, commenting that "development discourse will be conceived as an integral part of capitalism's organizers' ongoing attempts to gain and maintain hegemony-to make capitalism seem the natural order of things-all over the world." Moreover, political scientist Siba N'Zatioula Grovogui argued that purportedly universal law has been an exercise in denying or suppressing the subjectivity of non-Europeans.
Yet at the same time, many of these theorists, much like philosopher Michel Foucault, ignored gender relations in their understanding of development terms like "production," "process," and "the market"-all of which are entries in Sachs' development dictionary. Anthropologist Arturo Escobar's masterful account of development discourse as panoptic gaze is, on the other hand, somewhat of an exception. He argued that women were integrated into development as a passive contingent, "consonant with conceptualizations of the problem of development already put together in Washington, Ottawa, Rome, and Third World capitals."
However, critiques of the specifically gendered character of development have recently emerged along a parallel track. Years ago, Women in Development (WID) literature was written to protest the exclusion of females from development planning and from the long-term fruits of development, including access to education. More recently, however, political scientists Jane Parpart and Marianne Marchand's edited volume, Feminism, Postmodernism, and Development, has shown a connection between colonial/neo-colonial discourses: "The critique of colonial constructions of the 'Third World woman' has revealed the hierarchical, dualistic nature of Western thought, and its tendency to reify and reinforce the North/South divide for women as well as men." Similarly, my book, Gender and Development: Rethinking Modernization and Dependency Theory took this approach one step further, outlining the underlying gendered dualisms at work in both modernization and dependency theory. I found that the modern theory was linked to masculine norms and that the traditional theory was essentially a surrogate for traits historically, and usually negatively, associated with the female. Lastly, one of the most interesting recent critical examinations of the connections between feminist postmodern theory itself and Enlightenment thinking is Elizabeth Pritchard's examination of development theory's root metaphor of mobility, a "way out" of stasis and tradition, both of which are associated with the household and women.
The insistence by some development practitioners that discourse analysis is irrelevant to their work is belied by the connections made by international donors and lending agencies between modernization, large-scale development projects, and the liberalization of economies. Underlying the prescriptions is a notion of what social scientist David Simon calls a "particular rationality, order, and process of technological diffusion"-in other words, a blueprint for development that resembles the model of development followed in the West. Thus, discourse analysis that challenges such representations of development and modernization is still valuable. Moreover, examinations of the role that gender continues to play in structuring Western interaction with "the rest" of the world is important as well. Social scientist Chilla Bulbeck's analysis of, among other things, the continuing tendency on the part of Western feminists to magnify differences, to objectify and attribute timelessness to third world women, and to continue the search by westerners for spiritual wholeness through encounters with the third world, is an important reminder of how discourse still structures power relations in the global system.
While Velasco's epitaph for dependency theory perhaps missed an opportunity to link it with critiques of globalization, there is certainly merit to his implicit argument that dependency theory referred to older and increasingly outmoded forms of state interaction and global economic conditions. Analyses of structural adjustment, for example, have been increasingly supplanted by discussions of global restructuring and analysis of the new imperialism. Dependency-inspired revolutions that promised transformations in economies, gender relations, and ultimately development, now appear to be an obsolete form of nation-state resistance to global capitalism. As Argentina demonstrates, economic crises now often prompt closer ties to global capitalism. There is no sign, even amid robust protest and resistance, that revolutionary delinkage is on the horizon. The optimistic state-led strategies aimed at revolutionary transformation-and the associated struggles to realize women's specific and strategic gender interests both during the revolution and after-have been buried in the 1989 triumphalist victory of capitalism over communism.
