New Discourses on Development

Abstract

This article introduces and analyses the preliminary results of a larger study that explores the connection between new discourses on development and the imagined futures for Latin America. A primary assumption guides the whole proposal: collective imagination does not work in a vacuum; far from it, it operates within a social discourse, which sets limits to the thinkable (Angenot), and within a regime of historicity, which organizes our relationship with temporality (Hartog). We sustain, in particular, that a productive mode of approaching the ways by which we imagine the region?s futures is to think in terms of more or less defined discursive configurations about development. We assume that knowing and understanding these configurations can help us capture in an organized way the diversity of the voices that dispute and confront each other, more or less fiercely, around development and the imagined futures. As Angenot has pointed out, recovering Bakhtin s teachings, it is convenient to think of speeches not as impervious monads, but as links of dialogic chains. Furthermore, knowing and understanding these configurations can help us better define both what we want and what we do not and, consequently, better outline our action strategies. The taxonomy of the discursive configurations that serves as a starting point for our study it is not a completely original creation, but is based on previous proposals from several authors, including our own (Kozel and Sili, 2017; Calderón, 2015 and 2013; Araníbar and Rodríguez, 2013; Katz, 2016; Svampa, 2016). Specifically, we begin by distinguishing six new typical discursive configurations on development. The configurations are: sustainable development (SD); development in neoliberalism (DL); neo-developmentalism (ND); post-development (PD); development in socialism (DSOC); local/territorial development (DLT). The adjective new refers to the last three decades (it is not a completely arbitrary choice, since 1990 represents a breaking point in several senses: geopolitical, technological, environmental). Using tools taken from the structural analysis of ideological discourses, we try to sketch a stylized profile of the images about the future related to each configuration, for which we work on materials considered especially illustrative and contrastive. Among the dimensions of the future prioritized by our analysis are geopolitics, the network of actors involved, and technological and environmental issues. A certain dose of schematism and arbitrariness is inevitable in an exercise of this kind; however, the fact that the procedures are visible enables the possibility of making adjustments and rectifications.