“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral” (Paulo Freire, 1921-1997).

This issue of Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review is devoted to the theme of ‘Professionalisation and Deradicalisation of Development Education’ and is centrally concerned with a number of paradoxes and contradictions that characterise the field in an era of neo-liberal shaped globalisation. It addresses, in particular, the question of why the development education sector endorses, tacitly or otherwise, the very ideologies and political-economic arrangements that are responsible for producing or exacerbating conditions of poverty and injustice, while simultaneously encouraging people to take action against this poverty and injustice? It asks: What are the implications of retaining a politically detached stance on crucial policy issues that the sector is ideally positioned to respond to? Why does the sector sometimes have surprisingly little to say about key development issues and crises as they are played out in local contexts? What are the consequences for development organisations that do take on divisive ‘local’ issues? What have efforts to ‘mainstream’ development education within formal education meant for the radical underpinnings of the field? What does it mean to ‘do’ development education in an era of financial austerity and insecurity, where people’s lived experiences increasingly clash with their inward expectations and desires for their (now blunted) futures — futures which were, for many, until very recently, imagined in far more positive and hopeful terms? How are government cuts to development education impacting on its practice? Do the long-term educative goals of informing citizens about the underlying structural causes of poverty and injustice inevitably become compromised or obscured within the context of more immediate ‘bread and butter’ tasks like fundraising for development programmes in the global South? How can those whose task it is to educate people about the structural and systemic features of global poverty best align themselves within organisations whose primary function is to fundraise and raise awareness about their projects overseas?

The question of whether development education has been ‘de-clawed’ or stripped of its original radical underpinnings, based on the ideas of such radical thinkers as Paulo Freire, is an uncomfortable one for those of us who identify ourselves as development educators, with our claimed commitment to ambitious goals like social transformation, global justice, and poverty eradication. The question is ‘thorny’, not least because it requires us to cast the gaze on ourselves, forcing us to ask—as well as respond to—difficult questions about the possible disjuncture between the professed rhetoric, values, and organising principles of development education, and the policies and practices we enact, endorse or contest through our work. As development educators, we are acutely aware of how our everyday actions or inactions, our complicity or contestation of dominant discourses and ideologies, can have very real material consequences. We encourage learners to embrace pedagogies of discomfort which cause them to reflect on their own positionalities within local and global hierarchies (Boler, 1999). Applying the same principles of reflexivity and critical scrutiny to the field itself is a challenging, conflictual, and in some ways dangerous endeavour; yet it is arguably also a very timely exercise because unprecedented political, economic, and environmental crises are forcing us to think and teach about familiar topics in radically different ways. While in many ways, the old questions — whether they be about effects of loan conditionality imposed by international institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or the social and environmental impact of multinational corporations — remain the right ones, it seems that now, more than ever, they need to be posed in new and different ways.

Concepts such as de-radicalisation and de-politicisation are also already familiar terrain within the broader field of international development. Ferguson’s seminal Anti-politics Machine, from which the title of this editorial takes inspiration, explains how the development apparatus, similar to the anti-gravity machine which suspends the effects of gravity in Science Fiction stories, can function as a kind of ‘anti-politics machine,’ ‘suspend[ing] politics from even the most sensitive political operations,’ while simultaneously strengthening statutory power, all at the flick of a switch (Ferguson, 1994:256). 

Moreover, the co-optation of radical projects and discourses by powerful actors, and the subsequent muting of their transformative potential, is one of the hallmark strategies of neoliberalism. Feminist scholars have demonstrated the ways in which policy commitments to gender equality often ‘evaporate’ or become heavily ‘diluted’ as they move through development bureaucracy (Longwe, 1997), such that an essentially political project gets reduced to a technocratic activity to be measured and evaluated in terms of analytic tools, frameworks and mechanisms, thereby restricting rather than amplifying the scope for transformation (Cornwall, Harrison & Whitehead, 2008:9). The neoliberal emphasis on performance, efficiency and accountability within the development industry is further implicated in a narrowing of development aspirations and a reluctance to tackle some of the more challenging dimensions of global poverty, gender injustice, etc. The preoccupation with impact measurement, for example, has arguably resulted in a situation whereby tangible and expressible indictors and measures often drive development goals and targets, rather than the indictors being determined by, and following from, the goals themselves (Unterhalter, 2005). 

Concrete examples of de-politicisation in action can be found in recent development frameworks such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The disjuncture between the ambitious nature of the third MDG, with focuses on promoting gender equality and empowerment, and the far more limited target of eliminating gender disparities in education, has been the subject of considerable criticism. The Beyond Access project in the UK, for example, has highlighted the problems associated with employing gender parity as a measure of gender equality, pointing out the persistence of gender-based inequalities in societies where universal access and high levels of educational attainment for women already exist. 

Indeed, the most powerful players on the international development stage, including the World Bank and the IMF, have become increasingly skilled at appropriating political concepts like gender to present a progressive face while perpetuating the status quo. As Vavrus (2003) suggests, policies and programmes aimed at promoting gender parity and girls’ education supported by development institutions like the World Bank tap, albeit superficially, into equity concerns, thereby obfuscating the economic and political crises triggered by the neoliberal policies that these very same institutions devised. As Klees explains, the situation is akin to a ‘good cop-bad cop’ scenario, with frameworks like the MDGs serving as a:

“compensatory legitimation’ function for states and agencies that are deeply implicated in the perpetuation of global poverty. In order to compensate for the intensification of poverty and inequality associated with detrimental political-economic arrangements, which call into question the legitimacy of the social order (‘the bad cop’), key players in the world system of neoliberal globalisation introduce policies like the MDGs, aimed at ameliorating some problematic symptoms and thus restoring legitimacy (‘the good cop’)” (Klees, 2008).

As development education becomes more formalised in institutional and policy arenas, and concepts like ‘global citizenship’ have become ubiquitous across a range of ideological camps, some development education scholars and practitioners are becoming increasingly concerned about a possible de-radicalisation of what they see as an essentially political, ethical and transformative project. Within the formal educational sector, for example, some have pointed to an inherent tension between the goal of development education — which seeks to develop active citizens who can respond to pressing global issues — with a more dominant instrumentalist approach to schooling which views the primary purpose of education as to prepare students for competitive employment in the global marketplace (Andrzejewski & Alessio, 1999). Recent policy proposals to ‘eliminate’ or ‘discontinue’ academic subjects from education programmes within Colleges of Education in the Republic of Ireland and to instil a ‘relentless focus’ on literacy and numeracy within teacher education and in schools, as laid out in the recently published Draft National Plan to Improve Literacy and Numeracy (Department of Education and Skills, 2010), can be seen as part of a broader trend to further entrench this ideology of instrumentalism and performativity that is characteristic of the encroachment of neoliberalism in all spheres of life. The Literacy and Numeracy plan, which argues that the inclusion of subjects and themes like social and life skills, environmental issues, arts and music education has meant that ‘…the time available for the acquisition and consolidation of critical [sic] core skills has been eroded’ (2010:25), has potentially negative implications for already marginalised subjects like development education.

Fears about the future of development education in schools are amplified within a context of global and national economic crisis. Since the onset of the recession in the Republic of Ireland, public debate about education has become almost exclusively concerned with economic rationalism and the role that education can and should play in national economic recovery. Within this instrumentalist framework, the type of ‘knowledge worth having’ is identified, implicitly or explicitly, as only that which supports employability, competitiveness and ‘our’ international reputation and educational rankings in a context of market-led globalisation. Within post-primary schools in the Republic of Ireland, the exam-driven focus of the curriculum has already been identified as a major obstacle to the meaningful inclusion or in-depth exploration of development issues and global justice themes in schools (Bryan & Bracken, forthcoming). There is much evidence to suggest that the wider context within which teachers perform their work may constrain their more ambitious aspirations to foster more critical forms of engagement with development themes and issues (Smith, 2004). Those teachers who have a sophisticated understanding of complex development issues are often torn between engaging students critically with complex development issues and ensuring their students produce ‘safe’ and acceptable answers in the context of a competitive national examination system (Bryan & Bracken, forthcoming). 

The implementation of Citizenship Education as a discrete academic subject in formal educational settings, while creating a formal space for consideration of development themes and issues, has also arguably contributed to the de-politicisation or ‘de-clawing’ of development education. Citizenship Education is widely perceived by teachers and students as a Cinderella subject, due to the failure to grant it parity of esteem with other academic subjects (e.g. Bryan & Bracken, forthcoming; Davies, 2010; Gleeson, 2009; Niens & McIllrath, 2010). Problems also abound with the substantive content of citizenship curricula in schools. A comparative analysis of Citizenship Education textbooks produced in Australia, Canada, and the UK by Davies & Issitt (2005) highlights a disconnect between official rhetoric, which supports a radical conception of Citizenship Education, stressing the need to engage with the challenges and complexities of the current historical moment, and the reality of curriculum resources providing mere surface treatment of these issues, and failing to engage with issues of power. These authors highlight the tendency within these materials to privilege national rather than global issues, to devote limited attention to issues of diversity and to favour cognitive thinking or reflection about personal issues over active involvement in political issues.