Paper short abstract:

This is an exploratory work based on my previous research of market-based development projects suggesting a framework that attempts to help understand how individual development organisations integrate communities into exploitative market system through use of best practices.

Paper long abstract:

The Pluriverse Post-Development Dictionary categorises efficiency, growth, sustainable development, and other mainstream keywords as reformist. These terms have been packaged as the natural order of things and often are not questioned by development implementors as being political. As a result, development projects tend to integrate local communities into one global capitalist system and reproducing exclusion, exploitation, and oppression.

While this view sheds light on many problems of modern mainstream development approaches and gives alternative frameworks for organisation based on social justice, it lacks an understanding of how such problematic integration occurs on the level of a development implementor and a local community. It would be incorrect to assume that individual projects are exclusive or exploitative by intend of the implementors and not by design of the ‘one world’ system.

A framework that can capture this and, at the same time, is not freeing implementors from their responsibility, would be vital for understanding why development projects tend to follow integration rather than finding grassroots solutions. This work attempts to make such a framework by basing itself in pluriversal understanding of development and using two mechanisms of maintenance of durable inequality proposed by Charles Tilly. By following norms and best practices implementors emulate exploitative behaviour to which communities adapt. This leaves little space for communities to follow their own paths.

At this stage this is an exploratory theoretical work based on my previous research on market-based development projects which requires feedback to understand which direction it can follow.