Dependency theory is experiencing some kind of comeback and has been discussed at length on the 黑料社区 blog. However, one criticism that often comes up when researchers work on the phenomenon of dependency is the fact that the separation between the spheres of periphery and centre may be too simple, insofar as the working class is also exploited in the countries of the centre, and the elite also benefits from such a system in the periphery. While some strands of dependency theory may provide important angles for analysis of trade between the Global North and South, such analysis also risks pitting development in the center against underdevelopment in the periphery. It is worth noting, however, that many dependency theorists did not think of the world in such binary terms, but rather centered class analysis in their frameworks.

In our recent work, we approach the problem of dependence slightly differently in an attempt to nuance our analysis. Dependence is linked to the country’s international insertion, , and is reflected in and unfavourable terms of trade. However, 鈥榙ependent鈥� countries have followed varied trajectories, which need to be analysed in their context, as dependency is not black and white. Let鈥檚 zoom in on West Africa. There, dependency is mainly based on . A rent is defined as obtaining income without contributing to the production of additional goods and services. In a , we have sought to understand a very specific historical case, representing an important rentier economy that was also well integrated into the global economy. We have sought to combine dependency and to understand the stability of such a rentier economy. Let鈥檚 explore the economic history of Burkina Faso.

Following decolonization, a post-colonial model was put in place, based on an export economy mainly steered by the cotton industry. The newly-independent state replaced the French administration, enabling the elite to exploit raw material rents. Who were the main characters? Inherited from colonization, the system created a division between a class of urban wage earners – with legal rights – and the great mass of rural workers (), for whom customary rules applied. The Mossi nobility, which controls cotton production in the center and east of the country, has inherited an important role and contributed to the formation of the Burkinabe state. However, in the West of the country, the majority of cotton growers come from various acephalous or segmented societies, escaping the influence of traditional chiefs. The Catholic Church is also an important actor. It retains its coveted position as a training institution for the elite, a position it already held during colonization. The state organized the economy in such a way as to guarantee the rent, thereby curbing all other attempts at accumulating capital. Through this strategy, competition was organized into a monopolistic regime.

The organization of production and foreign trade forced the country to import equipment, food and petroleum products. The economy remained marked by a structural trade deficit characteristic of dependency. In the 1960s, the model went into crisis due to climatic and economic factors, becoming even more pronounced in the 1970s. Monetary and economic policies varied, correlating with the frequent changes in government leadership that marked this early period, indicating an unbalanced rentier regime, with a compromise that is not stabilized yet between the different actors (owners as receivers) of the rent.

The revolution of the Sankara regime marked an important transition, with a reconfiguration of rent redistribution and an upheaval of institutionalized compromises, illustrating the . In 1983, Upper Volta became Burkina Faso. Sankara re-established budget contraction and introduced a policy of self-adjustment, coupled with protectionism important public investment, especially dedicated to rural development. The Sankara period marked an evolution in several areas. Trade unions and traditional chiefs, deemed responsible for the backwardness of rural areas, were sidelined or even repressed, in favour of the peasantry, whom the new regime sought to turn into a revolutionary class. However, tensions built up in the highest spheres of power, undermining the already uneasy legitimacy of formal institutions. The unions gradually began to unite again. International pressure supported the discontent of the former political coalitions left behind by the Sankarist regime.

In 1987, following Sankara’s assassination, power passed to Compaor茅, who prepared to overhaul the state and the economy. The new economic policy formulated in 1991 emphasized liberalization. With this new policy, Burkina Faso embarked on an . This led to the development of export resources, due to the significant growth of Foreign Direct Investments through a deliberate strategy on the part of the government, which is also focusing on new forms of income – those generated by democratic openness and compliance with international standards of good governance. The State is developing marketing techniques to maximize its rents. Decentralization was also introduced in the 1990s, in line with international recommendations. For Burkina Faso’s government, it provided additional space for the accumulation of resources, through the flow of foreign aid to local projects. Thus, the new growth regime does not represent a profound structural break, but rather an exacerbation of rentier tendencies, with a diversification of resource sources. It is actually indicating an accentuation of dependency, in return for international gains and new sources of income for the ones involved in rent gains. The clientelist mode of resolving redistributive conflicts stabilized the regime when Compaor茅 remained in power from 1989 to 2014, implying a continual increase in the number of rent recipients to make it work. Compaor茅 thus re-established coalitions in power before Sankara, in a new configuration. For this, the cotton sector was not fully liberalized, contrary to the recommendations of the World Bank. On the external front though, there is a close link between the government and its technical and financial partners. The Compaor茅 regime’s status as a good pupil in the implementation of the international financial institutions鈥� recommendations and conditionalities has enabled it to maximize its rents.

What do we want to show through this story? Despite the country’s dependence on international trade (since decolonization, it has been confined to the production and export of low-value-added primary resources) and monetary structure (), the particular form of the Burkinabe state, combining the constraints of good governance and clientelist practices, helps to perpetuate this form of dependence, which benefits a small part of the population, to the detriment of all its citizens. The regime changes over time but is maintained. Although it is integrated into international trade and suffers its effects, Burkina Faso cannot be qualified as a passive periphery. Through its political elites, this country has pursued active strategies to obtain international resources, which have repercussions on the forms of production and employment. This raises the question of the diversity of models for dependent economies. The trajectories of these economies are varied, so that even a dominated regime deploys its own internal specificities, which make it possible to distinguish its model of regulation from other countries subject to the same constraints. In this context, a more in-depth analysis of dependence using a regulation approach proves pertinent, as the latter attempts to grasp the overall coherence of external (at the international level) and internal (at the national level) institutional forms.

Juliette Alenda is an Assistant Professor in the chair of economic theory and policy at Radboud University. She works on (environmental) sustainability and transformative governance in sub-Saharan Africa and co-coordinates the research group Transformative sustainable change in Action. 

is a lecturer at the University of Lille, interested in questions of sustainable development in West Africa.

Photo by .

鈥極n ne d茅veloppe pas聽; on se d茅veloppe.鈥�

This famous sentence from Joseph Ki-Zerbo could be translated as 鈥榳e do not enforce development; we develop ourselves.鈥� However, development paradigms have been largely influenced by external views, mainly those of Western countries. 鈥淒evelopment鈥� is considered as a moral concept. Many people around the world suffer and don鈥檛 have access to welfare programmes that are fundamental to strive, hence the need for development, through the improvement in terms of basic needs and democratic institutions. However, development as a concept is far from having a universal definition, on how to develop and the ultimate goals of this development. Development paradigms are fundamentally linked to ideologies. In particular, the connection between the economics discipline and the dominant development paradigm is deep. Thus, rethinking development also calls for rethinking the assumptions in the economics discipline. In this blog, I summarize the main ideas of a recent paper I published (鈥溾��).

The holy triad of economics: 鈥榤arket-scarcity-rationality鈥�

Karl Polanyi established two different definitions of economics: a formal one, used to justify the rise of self-regulated markets, and a substantive one, trying to show that markets are not a universal truth in the history of human exchanges. The formal definition refers to the logic of rational action and decision-making based on alternative uses of scarce resources. This formal approach has gradually become the dominant definition of (mainstream) economics, through the theory of utility value, based on the subjective utility associated with the consumption of goods and services. In this view, the primary focus is the individual, captured through the market relationships that he or she enters into. Resources, as natural resources, are allocated through market mechanisms, the main instrument of efficiency in what is called neoclassical economics. The implications of these assumptions are very important for development.

Since the process of formal decolonization began, the mainstream view of development has been founded on the assumption that post-colonial economies can develop in the same manner that Western countries did. In this sense, they are assumed to simply be at a later stage of Western economic history. In this context, economic growth is often considered an indicator of progress. This idea gained currency with modernization theories that started to dominate mainstream development discourse after the second World War, conceiving development as an imitative process, establishing from the onset a distinction between a modern sector (capitalist economy derived from the Global North) and a traditional sector (considered as a subsistence economy, that should be abolished). With the Washington consensus in the 1980s and the resulting structural adjustments, pulling developing countries towards stability, getting them as close as possible to the market ideal was the new goal for development, society becoming an auxiliary of the economy. In the 1990s, the discourse of international financial institutions evolved, as they incorporated political and social dimensions to their economic analyses to better explain the failures of the past. However, instead of challenging the fundamental assumption of this narrative, the new incorporations simply include more ways in which the developing countries need to 鈥榗atch up鈥�, such as through developing better institutions. We went from economic determinism to institutional determinism and not much has changed over time.

However, the mainstream view of development has been challenged from many quarters. For example, as scholars from the Global South long understood, underdevelopment and development are actually two sides of the same coin, based around the uneven accumulation of capital on a world scale. Dependency theorists, the regulation school, and post-developmentalist theorists all recognized this. Economic growth and capital accumulation in the Global North still relies on . Even alleged attempts to become more sustainable, as with electric cars or renewable energy, rely on .  It is time now for new frameworks for development thinking.

Another definition for a multiplicity of possibilities

Now, the substantive definition defines economics as the way society meets constructed material needs, showing that markets are not universal as stated previously. The assumptions supporting the formal and the substantive definitions are thus fundamentally different. In the substantive view, economics is about the relation between human beings, with their environment, and the institutions supporting these relations according to their needs. Polanyi was only one of many social scientists across the North and the South that tried to fight for an alternative vision of economics and development. Among them we have Fran莽ois Perroux, Albert Hirschman, Dudley Seers, Frantz Fanon, Samir Amin, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, etc. But their voices were for being too Marxist, too socialist, or not economics enough. However, we can observe many movements across the world and history echoing what these authors said in their time, including political movements, indigenous movements, different perspectives of organising societies as Buen Vivir, Ubuntu, Ecological Swaraj, etc., drawing the possibilities for an alternative vision of economics and development.

Therefore, I argue that there are three main tasks ahead of us if we want to develop a better and more human economics suited to address the world鈥檚 needs.

First, an important problem with the mainstream vision of economics is the separation of the economic from human history. The economy in a neoclassical perspective is an isolated phenomenon, outside social, political or cultural spheres, making non-mercantile phenomena invisible or inefficient. It considers the . This is why I argue that there is a need to re-embed the economy in other spheres, to re-define the economy as a human economy. It is therefore a question of going beyond the state/market duality, which neglects other principles, as reciprocity, and forms of community-based development with their own institutions and ways of exchanging, coming from historical heritages and identities.

Second, the fact that models in mainstream economics are generally conceived of as universal is another important issue. 鈥淒evelopment鈥� has been formalized as a universal concept, with economists enforcing a Eurocentric understanding of the world. In reality, across the world, there is a multiplicity of values, identities, cultures and resulting ways to organise exchanges and relationships between people and with their environment. Not all countries, communities, individuals . The multiple relationships between the three elements corresponds to a diversity of institutional models, supporting human beings鈥� freedom and creativity in their relationship with the environment.

Third, re-embedding the economy also means to bring justice in to any approach to development. The idea of efficient allocation in mainstream economics (the process of allocating resources to the production of different products and services) means that resources are allocated to products according to the preferences of individuals, expressed in terms of their ability to pay for goods and services. on what are the priorities for the economy and the society. In the substantive perspective, the goals of economic life would be related to freedom, emancipation and justice, and everyone鈥檚 voice should count to determine social priorities. These goals imply to rethink the structures, from the international to local levels, the conditions of production and redistribution of wealth. Besides, the substantive view leads to various interpretations of property rights and modes of governance, and requires us to go above the individual level. Franklin Obeng-Odoom shows well, , how land is not a commodity but a social relation. In connection with a diversity of self-governance mechanisms, an alternative view of development would give more power to collectives and communities, through forms of local democracies. It is about democratising the economy too, as with cooperatives.

Collaboration and transformation

This blog post is overall a call to rethink the assumptions and discourses in the economic discipline, and their power in terms of influencing policy and development programmes. It is in line with post-development (a movement challenging the notion itself of development), explaining that changing discourses is a first step to change practices. Post-developmental theorists claim that re-orienting development is not enough, as the main paradigm behind development is the problem. Considering the deep connection between this paradigm and mainstream economics, I support this view. Besides, , such as ecological economics, which puts the environment and well-being as the goals of the economy, rather than seeing the environment as a commodified resource for the economy. Justice and equity should be at the heart of the economic analysis, also considering the contexts behind different views of justice and equity. My argument is thus about establishing the need to rethink structures, understanding the diversity inside the structures, and going beyond the developed-developing dichotomy. In practice, to move towards a substantive view of economics and alternative approaches to development, we need to collaborate rather than compete at all levels. This is necessary to face the challenges of our world and to achieve transformative change at all scales, including international, firm-level, in academia, and social movements.

Juliette Alenda is an Assistant Professor聽in the chair of economic theory and policy at Radboud University. She works on (environmental) sustainability and transformative governance in sub-Saharan Africa and co-coordinates the research group Transformative sustainable change in Action.聽