In my book Future Positive, I explore a vision of international co-operation based around two concepts that I think are useful in considering the future of development studies: 'critical friendship' and 'co-determining the future'. Central to these concepts are two of my own core convictions. First, in the postmodern world, it is even more important to hold fast to certain normative goals and visions, however much their realization may vary across history, context and culture. Second, all such goals and methods of fulfillment must be subject to deep, democratic negotiation, however difficult that may be to realize in practice. These two convictions are closely linked together. Rigorous negotiation can expose dogma or domination that masquerade as normative consensus, but normative goals and aspirations are what motivate negotiation in the first place, challenging the protagonists to surrender their particularities in search of some wider common vision. Why do these convictions matter for development studies in the century to come?
Since 1989, the dustbin of history has become increasingly overcrowded, as old concepts have been critiqued and discarded by scholarship and activism. One item we have been glad to throw into the rubbish bin ourselves is the notion of 'developed' and 'underdeveloped' as fixed and separate categories. This notion has corrosive corollaries in theory and in practice: development studies as the 'First World' examining the entrails of the 'Third'; development policy as an unequal struggle between donors and recipients. In both cases, the subjects have been etherized like patients on the operating table, and divisions reinforced between supposedly separate worlds to gain advantages of power, voice and orthodoxy-thinking versus doing, economics versus politics, science versus subjectivity, 'us' versus 'them'. Now the good news: in a world of increasingly interconnected causes and effects, porous boundaries and hybrid institutions, development studies can liberate itself to become the inter-disciplinary study of the progress of peoples.
The mention of 'progress' here will no doubt ruffle some feathers and raise some concerns. We have good reason to fear this word when interpreted as a linear transition from tradition to modernity, defined in universal terms. But there is no need to abandon the idea of progress completely, for if we do, we may lose the moral compass required to guide our efforts, and distance ourselves from the fundamental driving force of human achievement. In my experience, people everywhere aspire to have more as well as to be