London; New York: Zed Books, 2012. xv, 240 pp. (Tables, figures, illus.) £18.99, paper. ISBN 978-1-84813-988-6.
In a series of interrelated discussions of the state of development in Southeast Asia, Jonathan Rigg interweaves ideas of development and social political indicators. His aim is modest even though he seeks to challenge powerful ideas that have continued to shape the development trajectory of the region. In the first place, Rigg seeks to show the limits of planning, of grand theories and model makings in achieving their developmental goals; in the second, to situate development within the contingency of time and space specific to the region; and in the third, to place the prospect of development within the spectrum of ordinary life where people, in their diverse environments and practices, develop their own plans. Rigg calls these kinds of local practices “unplanned development.” It refers to the fact that people develop but not necessarily along the lines of development plans issued by policy makers. The result is a useful overview of the limits of a grand developmental plan and insightful suggestions about the capacity of people and their ordinary life in generating their own version of development.
A substantial portion of Unplanned Development is concerned with the fate of grand ideas. After a concise introduction to the book in chapter 1, Rigg begins with chapter 2 by attempting to map the problematic assumptions of development planning by the state, the business sectors and the international agencies in different places in Southeast Asia (with some references to China and India). He argues that while planning seeks to justify itself as an objective social technology, it is basically a political project subjected to power relations. Planning is also standing on shaky ground even though it claims a totality of knowledge. It has never been effective. If it has, it is by chance thanks to extra forces at work. Rigg, however, acknowledges the ideological power of planning for it maintains the desires of members of a society for a better life. The notion of desire is appropriate for it connotes an aspiration that can never become reality, especially in the Global South. Rigg starts his story with post-World War II as if planning is a postcolonial phenomenon. Planning indeed could be seen as a symbol of decolonization and an attempt to construct a new time, but this aspiration is skewed by the limited capacities of the government and the strength of power’s matrices in manipulating development to serve interest groups. The postcolonial state thus has largely failed to deliver the promise of development, but the way out is also not as simple as to let the market do the job.
The third chapter makes just precisely this point. It undertakes the assessment of how neoliberal market ideology, which influenced the region in the 1990s, has ended up in disaster as exemplified by the financial crisis in Asia. Rigg, however, is careful in providing an explanation for the crisis, for one of the main purposes of this chapter is to criticize the causal explanations favoured by policy analysts. Central to this chapter is the relationship between the state and the market and how this relationship produced a dominant top-down developmental plan often outside the contexts of the social environment it seeks to develop. This chapter is carefully constructed to show the temporal conjuncture of the regional division of labor as Southeast Asia became part of the international division of labour as a result of pursuing export-oriented industrial policy. It prepares the ground for the following chapter, which provides a historical context for the region’s incorporation into the developmentalist paradigm.
Chapter 4 is the turning point of the book. Rigg begins by mapping the social and political life of developmental discourses in Southeast Asia from the 1960s (marginalizing thus the period of colonial planning) to the present. He assesses the fate of one major discourse which continues to operate in a variety of forms: modernization theory, and compare it to micro-inventions that took place at the same time in the realm of everyday life in the Mekong Delta. Rigg contends that the “ordinary” invention of the shrimp-tail water pump is as crucial as the much promoted Green Revolution in the “agricultural transformation” of Southeast Asia. The “unplanned development” of the shrimp-tail water pump effectively shows that the teleology of modernization theory is only one among many narratives of development. The local innovation of the shrimp-tail pump connotes multiple practices of development. This chapter thus marks the shift from problematizing planning to showing the importance of daily practices in developing livelihood.
Chapters 5 and 6 are the core of the book. They are about the power of the ordinary people in coming to terms with their life circumstances and how they generate the unplanned development for themselves. To represent the innovative life of the ordinary, Rigg first exposes the limit of knowledge constructed by institutions of development to create a profile of the poor for the satisfaction of quantitative measurement. The connection he makes about poverty alleviation and fertility decline in Southeast Asia is interesting for it raises the question of agency, of how the rural poor survives and how they seek continuity with their social life (in the village) while coming to terms with the mobility demanded by government’s industrial policies. Centering on what people do, the linkage between the rural and the urban is less a government strategy than people’s reworking of established practices of family, migrancy and place-making as well as dealing with the nature of farming. The practice of linking the rural and the urban survive several generations, but over time it has also contributed to the decline of fertility. In this chapter, Rigg manages to show the interplay of structure and agency. It provides a platform for the last chapter to offer a suggestion that any plan for development needs to be centered on the question of what people do in the specific contexts of space and time within which they are embedded.
Finally, while the bulk of Unplanned Development is concerned primarily with rural development, one could ask if the insights could be shared with scholars working on the city. In any case, the growth of mega-cities in Southeast Asia has made the notion of “planning” the most widely heard word in the region. Rigg’s book would at least challenge urban planners to think about development in a more diverse way and to start and end planning with the ordinary life of people in mind.
Abidin Kusno
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 178-180