Obituary of a manifesto

Moments of nostalgia are both moments of memory and invitations to rethinking. When the STEPS Centre at University of Sussex announced it was going to present a new manifesto for science, technology and development, it was a moment of expectation. The previous document, done 40 years ago and associated with legends like Hans Singer, was one of the great development manifestos. Forty years is a long time to reflect and turn self-reflexive.
The new manifesto has outstanding scholars like Ian Scoones, Andy Stirling and Melissa Leach working on it. Everything about its rituals seems utterly correct and open. Yet as one reads the manifesto one senses a redundancy. Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex, looks at the world and sees IDS.
Let us look at the document as a narrative. The framing is predictable. It begins like all manifestos with a litany of good intentions. Militarism is on the increase, poverty still haunts the universe. Yet for all the talk of poverty, there is no sense of it. One misses what Leonard Boff, a liberation theologist called “a preferential option for the poor against their poverty”. The critique of poverty which should have been a lens for understanding becomes a picture frame for IDS to memorialise itself.
The document returns to cliché. It claims to rethink the way we think about innovation. Every scholar thinks his project is a solution to poverty. It makes scholarship and poverty self-perpetuating and creates complicity between the two. The current document creates participation without a hearing aid. It reads poverty but misses out on the poor, their theorising, their modes of coping, their sense of the world. Because then the core would not have been the involvement with innovation but with democracy as an inventive process. Here instead of fetishising innovation, one sees innovation along with improving, coping, jugaad, satisficing and muddling through as strategies of survival and subsistence. The migrant, the marginal farmer, the craftsman, all improvise, invent and one needs a wider sense of that.
It criticises progress in terms of its directionality. But in discussing innovation in terms of who gets what, when and why, it offers window dressing. It recognises cultural variety but treats it superficially. The margins are still the object of study, not a subject of agency of innovation. It is still a managerial exercise, a human relations effort of laboratory-based science crying crocodile tears over land. Twenty round tables have added little to the imagination of science or democracy. The manifesto is a bit touristy. After its global round up, it returns home and becomes what it is, a provincial piece of Sussex.
One must accept it as a statement of good intentions. It claims to diversify the debate yet it does not pluralise it. It demands that the number of stakeholders increase to include laboratories, funders, civil society, international agencies. But this is still a technocratic space which emasculates politics or reduces politics to a few NGOs. What one misses is the imagination of democracy, the debates on alternatives present in the work of Ashis Nandy, Gustavo Esteva, Paul Farmer, Arjun Sengupta, Rajni Kothari. It confuses variety and choice for alternatives. The document lacks specificity. It asks for democratic scrutiny but never specifies a single institutional innovation from the Right to Information to the new models of swaraj. It points out correctly to distortions in health budget where 10 per cent of the health budget is spent on 90 per cent of the diseases that affect world’s population. Yet as analyst, it never sees itself as case study. It does not ask if the Sussex idea of science and development contribute to this impasse.
I am not asking for breast beating but IDS cannot be part of the solution till it recognises it is part of the problem. It fails to use the pathbreaking work of its own scholars like Robert Chambers on Farmer First or Mary Kaldor’s Baroque Arsenal to create the understandings for a different kind of innovation. Eventually it is a Boy Scout thesis, a text book civics. It talks correctly about innovations at the bottom of the pyramid, of the potential of local innovations but there is little about how to create genuine citizenship and equity in the world of science and technology.
There is something of value in its observations on distribution about user-centric innovation. But for that groups like IDS and Sussex university’s Science and Technology Policy Research will have to demystify themselves. They have to deconstruct the myth of expertise and rework it in terms of a democracy of knowledge. Bottom-up is poor metaphor for democracy. Bottom-up is a mechanical inversion at a time one is looking for transformation.
What is missing is a new set of keywords or critical ways of looking at diversity, sustainability and vulnerability that invokes a new sense of science, that studies and debates how science actually operates and the need for what Sheila Jasonoff calls a sense of humility. By black boxing science and seeing it as a problem-solving instrument it renders a disservice to science. It renders a disservice to itself by not internalising the work of scholars like Paul Richards, Jasonoff, and Bryan Wynne. One is mystified by this self-imposed illiteracy.
For a manifesto to be a vision, it needs a sense of imaginaries, constructs of possibilities which are not yet realisable. It has to summon the impossible, the not yet do-able, not to create a shopping list of clichés around sustainability and environment. These words are becoming plastic words, whose shapes and meaning change as they become appropriated or routinised. Does sustainability for the affluent have the same logic as sustainability for subsistence? Can one talk of justice in the world of IPRs or change when you do not want to rock the boat?
Sadly, at the end of the deliberation all one gets is the need for new innovation foras, a Global Innovation Commission. It reduces democracy willy nilly to Rule by Committee, where committees have no place for communities. It has some interesting suggestions but they are discrete, lacking the wisdom of the whole. One asks for more because one expects more from the world of scholarship. Yet sadly this is a document that illustrates the growing gap between the correct and the true. It is an irony that this new manifesto will have to live with.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist