The Unintended Consequence – Reviewing Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development”, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho

Image by Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. 2008.

Lesotho is a small, landlocked country in Southern Africa that has received an astonishingly large amount of international development aid since the mid-1970s. With the massive internationalist interventions the country has seen, the track record of the success of these interventions is quite dismal, or “one of almost unremitting failure” (Murray, 1981 cited in Ferguson, 1994, p. 8). Ferguson notes that this is not specific to Lesotho, and is likely indicative of a more general model, and thus he attempts to draw an understanding of the “development” sector by presenting an in-depth analysis of an international development project provided to Lesotho’s Thaba-Tseka district. He attempts to show how when large-scale development projects fail, such as the one in Thaba-Tseka, they produce unintended outcomes out of consequence of unacknowledged structures. These outcomes include the expansion of state power and a depoliticizing effect (Ferguson, 1994, p. 21). He calls this “the anti-politics machine”.

Ferguson begins his analysis with a deconstruction of the World Bank Country Report on Lesotho from 1975. While quite redundant in his analysis, he takes the report section by section, detailing the lack of evidence provided by the development experts who position Lesotho as a “less developed country”. This part of the book is referred to as “The ‘conceptual’ apparatus” (Ferguson, 1994, p. 23), as the report takes the larger “issues” Lesotho is faced with and repurposes them into technical problems, without accurately acknowledging the history of the country. Following this, Ferguson provides a detailed case study of the Thaba-Tseka Development Project, an agriculture project that began in 1975 and ended in 1984. In these chapters, he describes how the implementation of this project ignored the political forces present at both the national and local levels. This case study is rightfully the bulk of the book, addressing the “target population”, which articulates the “Bovine Mystique” – an explanation of how livestock practices in Lesotho are structured and how they contribute to the ideas of property and prestige (Ferguson, 1994, p. 166) – and the “deployment of development”, which discusses livestock and crop development. The concluding chapter takes place in “Part V: Instrument-effects of a ‘development’ project”, in which Ferguson voices “the anti-politics machine”. In his concluding remarks, he draws a comparison of the different apparatuses displayed throughout the chapters as one cog in the “machine”, defined as “an anonymous set of interrelations that only ends up having a kind of retrospective coherence” (Ferguson, 1994, p. 275). While this conclusion is the basis of the book, it can be somewhat lost in translation. He suggests that though plans constructed out of these apparatuses generally fail, it does not mean that they do not do anything. Rather, systems of discourse and thought are bound with the unplanned events that constitute the social world (Ferguson, 1994, p. 276). Does this mean we should try to address these systems, or are they inevitable and there is nothing we can do about them? Ferguson does not answer this question.

A true development skeptic, Ferguson paints a convincing picture for why development projects fail. The notion that international development organizations take largely complex issues, such as poverty alleviation, and muddle them down into issues that can be addressed with technical solutions, without regard for the political realities on the ground, is an accurate one. He explains how this starts in the planning phase, but he neglects to mention how imperialism and colonialism play a role in these failures as well. The Thaba-Tseka project, funded by the World Bank and the Canadian International Development Agency, is your quintessential top-down development intervention. Led by Western organizations who had not done the sufficient research into the history of Lesotho to understand the dynamics of the state, the failure of the project was rooted in Western ignorance, among other shortcomings described in the book. Ferguson uses colorful language, and there are times when he alludes to this fact, but he never affirmatively states it, which is a major flaw in the analysis. Nevertheless, his argument and articulation of how unintended consequences rise to the surface is persuasive, effective, and timely.

Addressing the overall “development” discourse throughout each chapter, the book falls nicely within the general development field. Breaking beyond theory, the case study of Lesotho provides a detailed understanding of how development projects should, and do, work. Ferguson, using the teachings of Foucault as a guide, has written a book that has gained the praises and criticisms of those in the development sector far and wide. It is an essential book for students of development practice, as well as development practitioners, and it should be on the bookshelf of every employee at the World Bank.