One summer afternoon on a train from Athens to Thessaloniki, some years back, I met a young Pakistani man in the snack car. He was in a seat, hands over his eyes, and at times he slumped abruptly. He seemed tired. We noticed each other when boarding the train—it is not all that often two South Asian strangers travel the same six-hour route through Greece. We got talking. He helped me establish when I had to leave the train, at a stop I still find hard to pronounce, Palaeofarsalos, to change to another line for my final destination. I asked him what he did for a living and he described working in a farm hauling stacks of wheat, processing it in a mill. His wife and daughter lived outside Islamabad. Foolishly, I asked for good Pakistani restaurants in Thessaloniki. He shrugged. Few of his compatriots could afford to eat in restaurants. I recalled a vendor from Bangladesh a few weeks earlier, in Athens's Plaka, selling rubber balls. Each time you threw them they flattened into a disc, and then, after a moment, became balls again. On them was painted an image of a frog, squashed, regenerated, and squashed again. It seemed an apt image for these men, shaken, jostled by circumstance, trying to gather the semblance of a life in new settings, speaking another language.

It was as the train slowed, nearing my destination, that I asked this man a question for which I already sensed part of the answer: How did you get to Greece?

I walked here. From Islamabad he took a train to Karachi. There he joined a group of men to the Iran border, let through by guards who looked the other way. They walked at night, in small groups, by road verges. Or they paid truckers to drive them a day's length, huddling inside. In this manner, they reached the border of Iran with Turkey, Kurdistan. At this point, his voice slowed and dimmed, and all he could say was that Kurdistan was very difficult. People died. What was left of the group entered Turkey and traveled across to Edirne, the border. Twice, the Greeks caught him, returning him to the border where Turkish guards drove him a hundred miles away and left him. Each time he returned, waited, ran across. The third time he got through.

The previous chapter presented the free-market doctrine of development. This chapter describes some of the ways this doctrine has been refined since then. IFIs and aid agencies became concerned with the capability of states to implement market reforms and work more effectively with non-state actors. At times known as the “new governance agenda,” the refinement now placed the onus on states to measure and ensure reforms. Accompanying the shift was a greater attention on whether civil society actors could manage the development process, tracking funds and monitoring results.

Within this refined doctrine MOS now featured prominently as a means of attaining development. But it also became Janus-faced. Management's positive face was its means to measure, monitor, assess, and reward suitable activities. Its negative face was the growing regulatory capacity it offered aid agencies and donors. The onus of civil society action rapidly shifted from the process of generating social change to that of handling donor funds. This latter face of management—characterized by its critics as oppressive, depoliticized—also acquired a different name, managerialism. Just as rapidly as management ideas became tied to the refined free-market doctrine of development, just as rapidly popular criticisms of this trend now spoke of it as managerialist.

This chapter brings to a close the trajectory of development outlined in this book. The regime of financialization remains present, the key unacknowledged influence on development studies, MOS, and forms of civil society. However, the concatenation that led to financialized capitalism may shift further, and in unexpected ways. As the next chapter argues, the space for resistance, and for challenging common sense, hinges on the manner in which such regimes exist and change.

Within development studies, further refinement of the Washington Consensus encouraged sharp reappraisal or rejection of the promise of development. Meanwhile management studies continued to move away from the ambitions of high management. Across both, two curious ironies were apparent. There was some acknowledgment of MOS’ relevance within development studies. But its complexity was foreshortened, relegated to demands of efficacy, getting work done, or demands of marketization, enabling competitiveness and performance. Meanwhile civil society was also recognized explicitly—as a partner of development and as a promoter of managerial expertise.

The previous chapter described how modernization theory emerged as the dominant doctrine of development, with an attendant emphasis on management theories and civil society organizations as drivers of modernization. This was a conception of the world held widely, in US think tanks as well as Southern government ministries, by academics in different disciplines as well as by practicing managers, engineers, and military personnel. It was hegemonic, speaking to different groups of people who, in this sense, saw the world similarly.

This chapter treads some of the same ground, but describes a conception that did not become hegemonic. Dependency theory did not command the widespread agreement enjoyed by those advocating modernization. It espoused a different doctrine of development, to resist global trade, increase domestic industrial production, and create domestic markets. Though largely ignored today, its tenets seen as relics of another time, its critique of trade structures has seen an unlikely resurgence as global demand pivots resource trade towards countries in South America and Africa. It relied on elements of common sense shared with modernization theory, and also enlisted technical education, industrial production, and forms of civil society to support its initiatives. However, the conception common to dependency theory was in sharp contrast to that of modernization. Where the latter emphasized markets and foreign trade, the former advocated indigenous industry and autarchy. Where the latter pointed to the West as a referent of modernity, the former portrayed it as a referent of trade exploitation. Only by avoiding global trade, investing in national economies, and weaning consumption from imported to domestic products could genuine national development take place. This chapter offers a further contrast, in that it profiles two advocates of dependencia, who sought to put such ideas into vivid political practice, Che Guevara and Salvador Allende.

The chapter begins with Raúl Prebisch's founding of the Comisión Económica para América Latina (CEPAL) and closes with Mauro Marini's Dialéctica de la dependencia (Dialectics of dependency), from 1950 to 1973. After presenting key themes of dependency theories, we turn to analogues within management studies, and consider the managerial visions of dependency theorists.

This is a book about development, management, and civil society, three terms not often used together. Bringing these terms into explicit dialog, within a project of critique, alerts us to their contradictory effects and encourages better recognition of the ways notions of management, development, and civil society interact. This introductory chapter outlines this argument in two parts, as interlinkage and as critique. First, I explain how development, management, and civil society are interlinked themes, and illustrate the theoretical value in exploring their interconnections through two examples. The contemporary example offered here is a growing backlash against non-governmental organizations (NGOs). I ask if such backlash can be considered to be critical. Therefore, second, I define a project of critique and the particular light it sheds on the interconnections of development, management, and civil society.

Specters of development, management, and civil society

The noted, in many ways admirable, Indian writer Arundhati Roy (2012) published an essay in the spring of 2012 called “Capitalism: A Ghost Story.” Outraged by the increased income inequality in India and worldwide, the development policies that privilege wealthy upper classes and disadvantage the poor, and the self-serving agendas of corporate philanthropy, Roy's essay weaves loose threads across a range of topics that point to the contemporary capitalist moment in India; they include Mukesh Ambani's high-rise mansion in Mumbai, political corruption, sale of mineral-rich tribal land to corporations, repression by state-funded paramilitary in central India, consolidation of corporate media and attendant-biased coverage, industrial corridors and people displaced by them, and the Kalpasar Dam which is to enclose a coastal gulf to retain river water.

Roy grounds her wide-ranging examples in a particular aspect of contemporary capitalism—philanthropy. Corporate philanthropy is accused here of many sins: white-washing corporate crimes through targeted funding of arts festivals; funding pressure-groups and lobbies to promote capitalist values (and the United States of America's [US] hegemony); shaping past and current patterns of global governance through the Bretton Woods agreement, the United Nations (UN), and the Trilateral Commission (now “a penta-lateral commission, because it includes members from China and India”) (Roy, 2012: 13); making microcredit a suitable development policy despite its serious flaws; influential awards that “become a gentle arbiter of what kind of activism is ‘acceptable’ and what is not” (Roy, 2012: 13); and creating an industry of human rights for “an atrocity-based analysis in which the larger picture can be blocked out” (Roy, 2012: 20).

A common theme in the explanations of the mass support for authoritarianism and sectarianism (often interlinked) across the world is an unintended consequence of the entrenching of economic inequalities created by neoliberal capitalism (Brown, 2019; Jackson and Grusky, 2017; Pierson, 2017). Resentments of those left out, this dominant explanation for rising sectarianism holds, was channelled by proto-fascist authoritarians to implicate all constituencies identified with democratic institutions and associated values like pluralism as unworthy and to be discarded (Frank, 2004; Mounk, 2018, Hacker and Pierson, 2020). Nativism was ‘not neoliberalism's intended spawn, but its Frankensteinian creation’ (Brown, 2019: 9).

The rise of sectarianism in India – Hindutva (Hindu supremacy) – has a different trajectory due to its early entanglement with traditional social hierarchies and the economic elite (Jodhka, 2016; Joshi and Malghan, 2017). The rise of Indian sectarianism to its now hegemonic status is due to the twin benefits it offers the indigenous plutocracy: a claim to cultural supremacy and the reinforcing of its economic interests (Chatterji, Hansen, and Jaffrelot, 2019; Palshikar, 2017). Support for Hindutva rises ‘as we go up the class hierarchy, as well as the caste hierarchy’ (Sridharan, 2014: 75, described later). It has been supported by the neoliberal state, even prior to its current transformation, through collaboration with Indian plutocrats to oppress challenges to its economic interests (Randeria, 2007; Sundar, 2010). Now with wealth extraction and display serving as evidence of religious supremacy, the sectarian state protects economic interests with an added religious zeal. The electoral successes of the collusion between big businesses and sectarian forces have intensified the state-led oppressions on behalf of plutocrats (Poruthiyil, 2019).

Resistance to sectarian plutocracy in India is being led by human rights groups like the Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and a number of Indian civil society groups such as the People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL). The focus of these organizations has been on the escalation in violence against weaker groups by majorities (like the spike in the lynching of Muslims), the destruction of democratic institutions such as the politicization of the judiciary, attacks on freedom of expression, unfair incarceration of dissenters, and the blatant favouring of corporate interests (Amnesty International, 2018; Human Rights Watch, 2019; Mander, Badhwar and Dayal, 2018; PUCL, 2021a, 2021b). Human rights activism tends to focus on egregious violations that trigger outrage while rarely addressing processes that widen material inequalities and benefit plutocrats.

This chapter considers at greater length an unusual coherence of management ideas that emerged by the mid 1960s and endured for about a decade. It also offers examples to better understand the consequences of such coherence. This was a “conception of the world” in Gramsci's terms, one shared by modernization and dependency theorists. The late 1960s through the 1970s saw an unprecedented and never again repeated coherence in the way management was perceived. It stretched across ideological divides, part of the common sense of the time. Management theorists moved a significant distance toward the ambitions of an administrative science. In doing so, their ideas also legitimized and emboldened authoritarian decisions and policies in different spheres. At its height of influence, international development actors relied on aspects of management thinking, offering the discipline unparalleled levels of visibility and legitimacy. The free-market doctrine of the 1980s marked an end to this taken-for-granted view of management ideas in development. Within MOS, however, this conception remains part of its foundational canon, unchallenged, indeed unremarked, the fabric with which its theories are knitted and the weave of the discipline maintained.

The first section describes this conception, naming it “high management.” The second section discusses the theories that offered “high management” legitimacy and authority, under two broad emphases—“high management form” and “high management style.” The third section illustrates “high management” in international development and civil society reaction. The section's attention is on World Bank projects of the time that adversely affected the status and rights of indigenous communities in the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, and India. It also considers the career of a prominent manager of development, Robert Strange McNamara, director of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. McNamara literally “twinned” notions of development and management.

A shared common sense in international development

From President Truman's inauguration to the first oil shock, 1949 to 1973, dominant views of development emphasized the following: technical knowledge and prowess as a driver of development, state planning to identify and accomplish overarching developmental goals, and close cooperation between donor organizations and state governments. Modernization and dependency theorists, despite differences of how to attain development, shared common sense about the techniques, skills, and knowledge required to achieve international development.

We inhabit a world, a capitalist one, that shapes what we know and what we think, incompletely, haltingly, in a fragmentary fashion. This means that efforts to accomplish the seemingly technical tasks encapsulated within development and management remain in fact intensely political efforts to understand and clarify what we observe. It remains essential to shed critical light on what otherwise appears to be detached and unchallengeable knowledge, and to cast a critical eye on how organizations claiming to serve a public good function, through the exercise of such knowledge. This chapter concludes this book by summarizing it in terms of three themes. First, I consider how management and development ideas accommodated shifts between three dominant capitalist regimes, namely, colonial, modernist, and financialized capitalism. Initially disparate, these accommodations gradually became connected to each other, and to a nascent and inchoate scholarship on civil society.

Second, I turn to common sense. What theoretical purpose can this Gramscian concept serve? I argue that common sense is an incomplete effort of perception by interest groups, where some of these perceptions gradually become naturalized within knowledge groups as conceptions of the world. When these perceptions are acted upon, and attached to epistemic foundations that gain purchase within networks of powerful actors, they become hegemonic. However, forms of knowledge, and the powers they represent, do change over time, often under pressure from other interest groups, or changing priorities within existing interest groups. Common sense and the allied concepts discussed in this book offer productive ways of considering expert power. They are more supple than terms that convey solely an ideological understanding, such as “managerialism” (see Chapter 7). They show the ideational shifts that happen over time, and the ways interest groups scheme to survive these shifts. Since this Gramscian approach also considers politics and the ways groups constantly maneuver with outside changes, in a dialectic that refines their conceptions and common sense, it can help us understand the prevalence and survival of organized interest groups.

Third, I ponder what the future holds for this rising alliance of conceptions in development studies, management studies, and civil society. Since I have argued that being against NGOs is insufficient from a critical perspective (see Chapter 1) and that it is simplistic to dismiss these organizations as all bad (or extol them as all good), what are other ways we can speak of them in the near future?

You can disembark at the Shadipur Metro station in West Delhi and walk down or take a rickshaw through the bustling Shadi Khampur bazaar. At the end of the main bazaar road, you will find a cycle rickshaw stand. In this nook of a predominantly working-class neighbourhood is the building housing the May Day Bookstore-cum-LeftWord Office. Walk in through the bookstore's bright yellow painted doors stencilled with ‘8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, and 8 hours for books and coffee’ (see Image 8.1) to lose yourselves in rows of bookshelves. As the name suggests, LeftWord publishes and distributes books on a range of subjects broadly aligned with the left ideology, issues concerning working lives, and Marxist writings. You will also find books from other independent publishing houses such as Tulika, Zubaan, Kali, and Navayana. It is a space that hopes to impel people to act against tyranny, imagine another future. A space that chronicles another time, as Castillo inscribes – Before the scales, tomorrow.

If you run into Sudhanva Deshpande, managing editor of LeftWord, he will generously offer you a cup of coffee at the bookstore's coffee corner – a brief encounter with him and you sense his deep commitment to left politics. If you are lucky, you might be able to time your visit with a play staged next door at Studio Safdar, an independent art space established by the legendary political street theatre group Jana Natya Manch (Janam). If you head to the May Day Bookstore on 1 May, you will find a room full of artists, academics, students, a lot of music, and poetry.

Accompanying the announcement of the largest-ever round of auctioning of coal blocks in India in June 2020 were stories of resistance from a relatively nondescript region of central India: the Hasdeo Aranya forests. The media outlets – regional, national, and even global – were replete with news of letters from sarpanchs (Alam, 2020; Kaiser, 2020), petitions from the gram sabhas (Mishra, 2020b), reports of organized community resistance (Dasgupta, 2020; MS, 2020), and even interventions from the state government of Chhattisgarh (Drolia and John, 2020; P. Singh, 2020) and the political elites like the former Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh (The Wire, 2020). The community resistance of 20 villages of one of the most impoverished states of India threatened to put a spanner into the prime minister's plans of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ (a self-reliant India) and dreams of becoming the world's largest exporter of coal (Gupta and Regan, 2020; PTI, 2020). The Guardian characterized Hasdeo Aranya as the ‘battleground’ where the ‘war’ for coal pitted ‘indigenous people, ancient trees, elephants and sloth bears against the might of bulldozers, trucks and hydraulic jacks’ (Ellis-Petersen, 2020).

However, descriptors such as war, battleground, and conflict are perhaps the least likely to be associated with the area based on traveller accounts. As one travels on NH130 around 300 kilometres from the state capital of Raipur, one is greeted by the relative calm and the resplendent beauty of the expansive Hasdeo-Bango reservoir (one of the longest, widest, and oldest multipurpose irrigation projects in Chhattisgarh, irrigating approximately 300,000 hectares of agricultural farms downstream) at the beginning of Hasdeo Aranya forests. For another ∼40 kilometres on the highway that skirts the Hasdeo Aranya forests’ periphery, the dense forest canopy that almost entirely blocks sunlight appears as a welcome relief to weary travellers. However, regular signboards indicating the need to be careful of ‘elephants’ and ‘sloth bears’ discourage casual tourists from stepping out to bask in the beauty of the surroundings. It is almost entirely possible to miss any signs of habitation at the first visit beyond the occasional wooden huts by the roadside, a couple of teashops, and the forest range office with its green signboards camouflaged with the surroundings.

Grainy black-and-white film and a wavering camera show a stately building suddenly obscured by a billow of smoke, accompanied by the sound of an enormous crash. It is the Moneda Palace, bombed by the Chilean air force on the 11th of September 1973. In the first of an extraordinary triptych, Patricio Guzmán's La battaglia de Chile (The battle of Chile) followed this image with interviews of a cross section of Chileans on the eve of an election held six months earlier (the last democratic election in the country until military rule ended in 1990). A plainly dressed woman explains that her family once lived in a shack, now they at least have a home, some bread. Another woman, in a tailored suit and impenetrable sunglasses, grimly demands the president's impeachment. Those critical of the government declare foreigners have infested the country (true Chileans are, naturally, not communist). But the election results actually endorsed Allende's policies, increasing his parliament majority. No matter, forces opposed to his government, with significant support from the US government and corporations like AT&T and Pepsi, chose military force. Democracy was convenient enough when things were going their way and easy to abandon when things were not.

Chile's coup can appear unconnected to international development, civil society, and management. But free-market economic thinking shaped resistance to Allende's statist policies and contributed to his toppling. After the 1972 oil shock, such thinking also encouraged a new approach in management studies that shone a particular light on civil society. High management was decisively abandoned and a curious transformation occurred. As one conception declined, where technocrats sought to design society for stated ends, another emerged, where competition and market information sought development achievements without intervention. Development policy makers now turned to MOS for ways to be competitive, performance-oriented, and capable of change. Management became a wand to release entrepreneurial energies in development and forestall the failing hand of the state.

The past three chapters tracked doctrines of development and attendant views of management and civil society, from the interwar years until the mid-1970s. This chapter considers the period after that, spanning two dramatic successive oil shocks and recessionary contractions in the North, enormous public debt in the South, and in the case of some African and Latin American economies, unsustainable levels of foreign debt and hyperinflation.

This chapter argues that international development was initially envisaged as a doctrine of increased resource production in colonies, for international trade, during the later colonial period, from the end of the 19th century to the start of the First World War. To increase resource production, colonial administrators and planners relied on management and organization studies (MOS), for techniques and skills to build and maintain different types of required organizations, notably factories. They also turned to colonial society itself, seeking social groups that would willingly commit to such practices.

The late colonial period is not commonly seen as the time when international development ideas began to be first articulated. Though some scholars have traced development ideas even further back in history, to Aristotle's theories of human growth (Rist, 2008) and John Stuart Mill's understanding of liberty (Cowen and Shenton, 1996), it is commonplace to identify the 1950s and US President Truman's Address as marking the “birth” of development (see Chapter 3). However, consistent articulations of international development did become commonly heard in the late 19th century, during colonial expansion. The chapter begins with an overview of colonial development, highlighting the significance of the dual mandate in the doctrine of development. It then proceeds to describe colonial-era management ideas, and particularly how notions of efficiency were understood as essential for good management. The final part of the chapter offers some examples of colonial-era development that relied on civil society organizations to deliver sought-after outcomes. In the conclusion to this chapter, I present the common sense, conceptions, and hegemonic perceptions that emerged at this time.

The introduction laid out a conceptual framework of administrative crises, legitimacy crises, and common sense. This framework is used here to understand the manner in which ideas of development, management, and civil society were envisaged during distinct points in the history of international development. These distinct points, climacterics, can be considered as accommodations between global capital flows, nation-state policies, and shared aspirations. The colonial period discussed in this chapter falls within the regime of “liberal capitalism,” an accommodation between the mercantilist intentions of the dominant colonial powers (Great Britain and France) and the economically ascendant US.