Critics of modern development

Ivan Illich

"We have embodied our world-view in our institutions and are now their prisoners. Factories, news media, hospitals, governments and schools produce goods and services packaged to contain our view of the world. We--the rich--conceive of progress as the expansion of these establishments. We conceive of heightened mobility as luxury and safety packaged by General Motors or Boeing. We conceive of improving the general well-being as increasing the supply of doctors and hospitals, which package health along with protracted suffering. We have come to identify our need for further learning with demand for even longer confinement to classrooms. In other words, we have packaged education with custodial care, certification for jobs, and the right to vote, and wrapped them all together with indoctrination in the Christian, liberal or communist virtues." (Illich 1997: 95)

Illich found the rational human decreasingly able to shape his or her environment because one's energies were consumed in procuring new models of the latest goods. According to Illich, rich nations imposed a straightjacket of traffic jams, hospital confinements, and classrooms on poor nations and called it "development." Yet, more people, quantitatively and relatively, suffered from hunger, pain and exposure than at the end of WWII... For Illich, the "benefits" of the modern world, even its medical systems, education, and democracy, were far from being obvious. The direction this takes is toward total abandonment of development because it inevitably involves growth that will ultimately prove falal. (From Peet and Hartwick, 2009)

Arturo Escobar

"Development can be described as an apparatus .... that links forms of knowledge about the Third World with the deployment of forms of power and intervention, resulting in the mapping and production of Third World societies.... By means of this discourse, individuals, governments and communities are seen as 'underdeveloped' (or placed under conditions in which they tend to see themselves as such), and are treated accordingly" (Escobar 1992: 23)

"Development was--and continues to be for the most part--a top-down, ethnocentric, and technocratic approach, which treated people and cultures as abstracts concepts, statistical figures to be moved up and down in the charts of 'progress'" (Escobar 1995: 44)