How Development Performs Its Values
Development names a lived experience as much as a policy ideal. By policy ideal, I mean a normative horizon shaping how states, institutions, and societies organise change, structuring governance rationalities and legitimating interventions (Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1994). Development is not simply what unfolds empirically on the ground but a set of expectations and aspirations about progress, justice, and sustainability (Li 2007). This ideal coexists with—and produces—contradictions embedded within institutions, narratives, and imaginaries. These contradictions should not be understood as failures to be resolved but as sites revealing the circulation of power and legitimacy in the present (Foucault 1980; Mouffe 2005). Approaching development from this vantage reveals how social order is continuously remade through tensions that defy simple resolution.
The ontology of development rests on understanding it as a systemic regime constituted by the simultaneous enactment of progress and the persistence of irreconcilable value conflict. It performs an appearance of value alignment—what I term “value simulation”—that sustains coherence between contradictory aims such as growth, justice, and sustainability (Luhmann 1995; Latour 2005). This appearance is not a superficial illusion but an operative systemic practice that holds the regime together, drawing from institutional, discursive, and symbolic mechanisms (Agamben 2009).
This framing draws on systems theory, especially Niklas Luhmann’s conception of social systems as self-referential, operationally closed yet structurally coupled entities (Luhmann 1995). From Luhmann, we inherit the understanding that social systems maintain their identity through recursive operations that both reproduce and translate internal tensions without resolving them. The critical tradition, particularly Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, alerts us to the persistence of contradiction as a condition of thought and society, resisting synthesis and closure (Adorno 1973). Political theory of pluralism, including Chantal Mouffe’s agonism, further clarifies how conflict and dissent are constitutive of democratic legitimacy rather than anomalies to be erased (Mouffe 2005).
The concept of “simulation” deployed here draws from Bruno Latour’s work on performativity (Latour 2005) and Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “performative regimes” (Agamben 2009). Simulation, in this sense, does not mean falsehood or deception but refers to the recursive enactment of coherence through practices that integrate and displace contradictions. It is a mode of performance that sustains systemic order by making value conflict manageable—never absent, always enfolded.
This systemic logic hinges on organized dissonance and recursive self-reference, making conflict a constitutive structural condition rather than an aberration. Paradox theory aids in articulating how such coherence is maintained without elimination or resolution of contradictions (Smithson 1989; Thompson 2013). The development regime thus exemplifies a paradoxical ontology where progress and conflict coexist in necessary tension.
Recognising this paradox challenges the dominant teleological narratives of development as linear or cumulative progress (Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1994). It refuses nihilistic despair by maintaining that coherence and legitimacy are actively produced and contested through systemic practices. This shifts the theoretical focus from seeking definitive solutions to understanding the mechanisms by which legitimacy is constructed, sustained, and challenged within development governance (Mitchell 2002; Li 2007).
The political and normative implications are significant. This reframing calls into question straightforward evaluations of development outcomes and instead invites scrutiny of how legitimacy claims are performed through institutional arrangements and symbolic discourse (Foucault 1980; Agamben 2009). It also opens new pathways to theorise governance under systemic contradiction—how authority, risk, and future imaginaries are shaped through practices that simulate value consensus amid persistent conflict (Beck 1992; Mouffe 2005).
References
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. 1973.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government. 2009.
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. 1992.
Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. 1995.
Ferguson, James. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. 1994.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1980.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. 2005.
Li, Tania Murray. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. 2007.
Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems. 1995.
Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. 2002.
Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. 2005.
Smithson, Michael. Paradoxes of Rationality: Theory, Control and Pragmatics. 1989.
Thompson, Michael. Paradoxes of Modernity. 2013.
