Lisa Thompson, in her critique of Development and Security in Southern Africa: The Case of Namibia, discovers little evidence of a commitment to or participation in regional organisations such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC — formerly SADCC, the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference). She looks to Namibia’s development policy documents for clues to this disinterest. Drawing on the insights of postmodernist critiques of development, Thompson deconstructs the language of Namibian development policies to reveal a startlingly uncritical acceptance of mainstream development discourse. This approach, which is grounded in the world view of international finance and development institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is resolutely committed to neoclassical economic solutions, with their emphasis on the nation-state, rather than regions, as the fundamental building blocks of development (and security). She concludes that this state-centric discourse has played a crucial role in Namibia’s apparent disinterest in regional organisations and concerns. However, an in-depth analysis of regionalism would have required further attention to issues raised in passing in a footnote. Concerns about the protection of sovereignty and cultural identity cannot be explained away as Western policy issues. Moreover, regional integration does not just exist (or not exist) at the level of policy. What about the informal trade and smuggling that flourish across the region, making a mockery of official policies carefully crafted in capitals far away from all too porous borders? And even more significantly, how do we explain the fact that this informal trade is often dominated by the poorest, most marginalised populations, especially women, who receive little attention in official documents about regional economic development and security? These issues need to be explored before we can fully pronounce on Namibia’s commitment to regionalism.

Given the limited involvement in regional development and security, Thompson focuses most of her attention on official Namibian development policies, especially their discourses and programmes for women. She cites some shocking figures — little has changed since independence. In 1990, five per cent of the population earned more than seventy per cent of the national income, while the poorest 55 per cent earned approximately three per cent of that income. Although about fifty per cent of households in the rural areas are headed by women, few of them own land. These figures immediately suggest the need for a redistributive policy with a gender focus. However, Thompson’s analysis of Namibian development documents reveals quite another response, one that reflects the world view of institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and many international non-government organisations (INGOs). Citing extensively from Namibian policy documents, Thompson reveals the close correlation between Namibian development policies and those of international hegemonic development discourses, particularly the commitment to privatisation, increased efficiency and productivity, a free market system and minimalist government. While women’s role in development merits occasional mention in these documents, they are only mentioned in relation to the goals of mainstream Women In Development (WID) policies, such as improving women’s productivity as workers and mothers, training programmes and other band-aid approaches to women and development. Empowerment, transforming gender roles and expectations and other ‘alternative’ ideas are notably absent, apparently silenced by the commitment to the WID approach of mainstream development discourse and policy.

Thompson’s main point — that Namibia’s development policies are deeply affected by and similar to those of the dominant development discourses and policies coming out of Western institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF — is convincingly and powerfully argued. The argument that the dominant discourse of development appears to have drowned out alternative perspectives, especially those concerning women and gender, is not in dispute as well. However, she overplays her hand. The emphasis on the hegemonic character of international development discourse and policy portrays Namibian policy-makers simply as puppets of international organisations and global forces. The chapter does not explore the possibility that these policy-makers may have their own reasons for adopting a neoliberal approach, or that official policy may hide the struggles and conflicting agendas and factions within national development policy-makers and discourses. An overemphasis on the hegemonic role of development discourse reifies the very dichotomies that poststructuralist thought has criticised. These dichotomies such as the first world/third world, dominant/dominated, coloniser/colonised, have permeated much of the writing on development. They reduce the developing world poor and élite to passive victims who play no role in their own history. But matters are rarely that simple. The Namibian state may produce documents that look like they were simply handed down from on high, but unless we know more about the struggles over those documents and the way they intersect with local conflicts over resources and meanings, they do not tell us enough about what is really going on. Thompson has made an important beginning, but we need to combine her deconstruction of development discourse with a more thorough analysis of the struggles over meanings and resources among those making the policies that now seem so neatly tied to Western agendas.

We also need to know much more about the marginalised, especially women. Women do make up a large percentage of the poor, and many of them have little or no land or resources. But the very poststructuralist thinking that Thompson draws on to critique development can offer insights into the complexities of power in everyday life. Women are not all poor, and those women who are poor, are not entirely without resources, both material and personal. If we are to understand the way policies affect the lives of people on the ground, including women, we need to know more about their daily lives and their everyday struggles over the way life is supposed to be organised, explained and lived. Recent writings on the colonial/postcolonial remind us that even the most powerful are affected by the ‘powerless’, and that, indeed, power is never simply the preserve of a small group. There are spaces in between where even ‘unequal’ people interact and affect each other, albeit not on a level playing field, but in ways that disrupt the easy notion that one side controls the agenda and the other is simply an obedient, disciplined pawn.1 The job undertaken by Thompson — the deconstruction of development policies and discourses — needs to be carried further, so that we can understand the complex, contradictory and fluid nature of policy construction and implementation, and can remind ourselves that even the most apparent hegemony constantly has to be reinforced and is, in fact, never as hegemonic as official policies claim. Only then will we be able to truly assess the degree to which alternative visions of development and gender have found unexpected places to germinate, even if officially they have no land of their own.

Endnote

A Stoler & F Cooper, Tensions of Empire, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997.