Participants in the present Research Project underlined the inadequacy of development theory and programmes ensuing from the economistic reductionism referred to above

Many economists and development experts are imbued with the mechanistic paradigm according to which "laws" (cause-and-effects relationships) can be drawn from the observation of social life. Mathematical models are supposed to substantiate the claim that economics is a value-free, universally valid, scientific discipline. This explains why development thinking and practice have given so much credit to economists as development experts. Yet, many basic pre-suppositions of economics are steeped into one particular culture, namely modern western culture. Economics, like sociology, suffers from deeply engrained, but often unconscious, ethnocentrism. Do things not go inevitably wrong when planning and project formulation are based on the narrow and simplistic approach of a so-called universal "homo economicus" defined as a person who engages into quantifiable cost-benefit calculations ? Reduction of human motivation to utilitarianism is deceptive. Experience in development work at local level, as well as the new holistic paradigm suggested by today's "hard" sciences suggest that it may be more realistic to come to grips with complexity.

Many failures in development planning and particularly in the sphere of economics, as well as much human suffering inflicted on local communities in the name of "development" are due to an approach of social sciences bedevilled by this reductionistic, mechanistic, if not deterministic paradigm and by an ethnocentric western(ized) bias. This bias is steeped in a linear social evolutionism looking at the North as the "model". It is as if the past of the North was the future of the South ! A new paradigm and new approaches are required. The expertise of economists is certainly necessary, but the economistic paradigm which underpins much of today's economic theory deserves to be radically questioned.

Developmentalism and unfulfilled promises

The reduction of people and of nature in the "third world" to their economic potential, the reduction of peoples' material and meta-material aspirations to quantified "needs" defined by experts in the offices of local or foreign capital cities lead to mal-development, worse to the obsession with "developmentalism" (Akpokavie. Participants define it as based on a perverse logic of growth, productivism, individualism, accumulation, profit-maximization.

Dependency-creating technology, artificial and narrow-issue credit schemes and crop-specialization characterize rural policies enforced on Ghanaian farmers. The effort to transform the peasantry (considered as backward, conservative, incapable or unwilling) by breaking down their "affective ties" (G. Hyden's "Economy of Affection" describing how African farmers value human relations as much as profit), the strategies to turn them into market-oriented entrepreneurial farmers capable to dominate (not just adapt to) their environment is severely criticized. A sharp contrast exists between the "dominant logic of development" and the "peasants strategy of development".

The Ghanaian country side is riddled with dashed hopes and unfulfilled promises of the eldorado of development. Most have laid the blame of these failures on the peasantry. Yet, peasants have rarely conceived these development programmes. The model of economistic development and the culture underpinning it is taken for granted as being in the best interest of the peasantry. In actual fact, colonial and post-colonial policies are often to blame for imposing a dis-embedded type of "development". Development strategies subverted the peasants mode of production by trying to transform them into cash crop producers for export.

State farms, development projects, resettlement schemes, rural colonization, all of these sophisticated novelties amounted to one major characteristic : the economic profit-oriented aspect of production was divorced from its social and cultural aspects. Peasants were and still are to be either transformed into producers of commodities or ignored and marginalized. Not a peasant-model of agriculture is sought after, but agrarian "modernisation" through intensive agricultural development, restructuring of the articulation between agriculture and industry making the former subservient to the latter, imposition of social relations of production compatible with a technocratic high-yield productivism.

Subjects not objects of development

This analysis leads to a new explanation of the enduring material poverty in much of the African continent.

Material poverty is the result of a deep conflict between experts claiming "you-can-be-like-us" and the deep need for identity, autonomy, dignity and human agency. People want to be actors : subjects not objects of "development". Rather than try to recolonise Africa - which would mean the re-imposition of the failed recipes of the past -, Africa should be allowed to find its own way, released at long last from eurocentric philosophies and value systems (CARMEN).
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