The Case of the Awkward Statistics: A Critique of Postdevelopment

Nearly a decade after its publication, Arturo Escobar’sEncountering Development remains a classic work of Postdevelopmentand Critical Development Studies, continuing to provide a relevant and devastating critique of development as a discursive tool for ordering and managing the Global South. What remains unanswered in Escobar’s work, however, is whether there is a material reality beyond mere representation that still needs attending to. I find that within Escobar’s work, the thorny problem of underdevelopment--as a persistent and abhorrent material condition--finds its way through Escobar’s poststructuralist epistemology. As this essay argues, though Escobar asks us to deconstruct development statistics in a way that upsets the West’s discursive hegemony, at the very least it is premature to call for an end to development, as well as the statistics and technical solutions development agencies provide.