Development

Discussion

What comes after 'development' ?

Holly Jean Buck:

"Turning away from “development” made sense given all its flaws—but in doing so, we can’t afford to lose a collective vision of the material and social state that people should enjoy.

Right now, there are actually multiple conversations about development happening, albeit somewhat outside the ambit of a book like Abundance. Most of these are focused on rural regions and small towns, which is at least part of why they didn’t feature in that book or the conversations around it. There’s a whole infrastructure around “regional economic development,” a field that despite several “turns” and trends (small-business growth, industrial clusters, “the creative class”) still looks very much like the “smokestack chasing” emphasis of the 1950s. People in economic development offices are still concerned with attracting big firms or projects, often in exchange for tax breaks. Much of the funding passed during the Biden administration for big manufacturing or energy projects aligned with this style of thinking.

Then there are the practitioners of “community development,” which is much more focused on what communities want (often parks or amenities, rather than economic drivers), and tends to center justice and empowerment. This is a bit of a caricature, but the point is that there are different ways of thinking that are often talking past each other. People are out there trying to merge them—the state of California went through a whole process to build a bottom-up “State Economic Blueprint,” organizing 10,000 people to give input to build 13 “community-led regional economic plans” that informed a state-wide strategy. But generally speaking, many of these professionalized efforts are not something citizens are engaged with, or that politicians and intellectuals are speaking to. Traditionally, the Democratic Party of the mid-20th century was very concerned with the development of peripheral regions; that has fallen into the background. Part of the appeal of MAGA futurism is that it gestures, however vaguely, to there being a future we are moving towards, one in which left-behind small towns and rural regions are included.

A recent poll from a progressive group asked respondents whether they thought “the big problem” facing the nation was bottlenecks from interest and community groups that make it hard to build, or big corporations holding too much power. The result was widely interpreted as meaning that people, especially Democrats, prefer “populism” over “abundance.” But this misses the point that abundance is, or should be, for a vision of the future, not just against a version of the present. Development is a concept freighted with failure and disappointment, and no one’s been able to reconceptualize it after 50 years of trying. But inventing a story for talking about the future we want is not the kind of project progressives can give up on, and “development” is too much a part of how we got to this point to leave it out of the discussion.

To be clear, this is not a call to revive the fatally flawed 20th-century notions of “development.” Rather, it means that we need to learn from what worked and what was poisonous within that way of thinking, in order to create a concept that actually accomplishes what “development” imagined it was about: telling a collective story about where we want to go, suggesting some strategies about how to get there, and offering metrics that tell us the truth about whether the project is working."

(https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-long-slow-death-of-development/?)