From developmentalism to developmentality: How development constructs its geographies of control and contempt

Abstract

Development is not a set of performative actions. Rather, it is produced and reproduced over the years as a discourse (in the Foucauldian sense) that operates through a variety of categories of knowledge. In this way, development is a set of socio-political and economic beliefs—an undeniable truth—that is exported to Pakistan through international institutions and technocrats. This paper attempts to understand the dissemination of development in Pakistan by focusing on the constructivist tendencies of development that employ various discursive strategies and language techniques to naturalize the socio-economic and political hierarchies both socially and spatially. Taking the planning and development of Islamabad—a model urban settlement and a crown jewel of development in the country's history—as the case study, this research finds that various labels, linguistics contrasts, othering, and socio-economic hierarchies were constructed and employed to construct the socio-materiality of development as a natural order of things. This developmentality (drawing on Foucault's governmentality) is found in more than 150 planning and policy-related documents from 1957 to 2018, showing the patronization and reproduction of power hierarchies, inequalities, exclusion, discrimination, and control.