An anthropological reading of the policies of international development: export competitiveness as a conjunctural case study

Abstract

Drawing on ethnography of the World Bank’s private sector development program, this paper explores the ways in which discussions of export competitiveness emerged in the past decade or so and how they interacted with larger discourses on solidarity and development. The immediate context within which this idea emerged was that of the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) which had maintained that the public regulation of the private economy compromises on industrial productivity (and by extension distributive social justice). But it would be naive to think that alternative ideologies have not tried to insert themselves within the Bank’s neoliberal discourse on development. If anything, discursive narratives suggest that the very notion of export competitiveness initially worked to justify the role of the state in regulating and incubating the private sector in developing countries even if these attempts became disembedded from their local contexts in the long run. This paper contextualizes this specific encounter on export competitiveness within the broader discourse of development and economic anthropology to examine the discursive politics of policy and knowledge in the global aid industry.